A few more book suggestions

Following last year’s post on books I read, here’s a selection of the books I read in 2012. They cover more general topics than last year’s focus on (South)(ern) Africa, as the main material on Africa I read last year was on current affairs (rather than background information), with daily newspapers and the hardcopies monthly magazines, such as The Africa Report, New African, and The Thinker.

Non-fiction

I’ll highlight three books that I think would be worth your time reading, for various reasons.

Delusions of gender—the real science behind sex differences by Cordelia Fine (2010) is a well-researched, solid, attack on neurosexism. She systematically debunks spurious claims about hard-wired biological differences in the brain that are increasingly being used to ‘substantiate’ why female humans supposedly would be cognitively less capable than male humans. For instance, the claims based on  ‘blobology’ with of MRI scans, where both the blobs (indicating an increase on brain activity) are flaky and there are statistically insignificant sample sizes to draw any meaningful conclusions that can be extrapolated to the world population (e.g., typically n is between 7 and 15). With the gendered neuroscience data these days, so argues Fine, we’re at the equivalent of the 19thcentury’s pseudoscience about IQ as ‘inferred’ from measured cranium circumfence.

The tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell (2000). It is an easily readable book about what the components are that make some seemingly insignificant aspect results in a relatively large effect, be they ideas, trends, or social behaviour, which is explained through many examples. There are the ‘rules of epidemics’, key figures in a social network (called connectors, mavens, and salesmen), and there has to be a stickyness factor that makes it stay. Maybe some would categorise it as just an interesting hypothesis because it hasn’t been tested well scientifically and there are only a bunch of references for each chapter, but it is fun to read and it does make one contemplate fads and trends and how they have or have not caught on. I read it over the (brief) holidays, and I found out that it is surely also a great conversation starter.

Affluenza (from influenza + affluence) by Oliver James (2007). I’d categorise it in the same just-an-interesting-hypothesis category as The tipping point. Although it is better researched, there are still many gaps that need to be filled before coming up with a solid theory on the emotional damages of materialism and greed and consumerism, how they come about, what is feeding the emotional distress (exhibited by, among others, depression and anxiety) the bad coping strategies (like addictions), and how to prevent it. Gurr identified the difference between absolute and relative deprivation decades ago and this book is squarely within the relative deprivation, but then implicitly making a further distinction within the relative deprivation between what I’d consider real relative deprivation (e.g., you rent an apartment but feel you should be able to buy a house [to make sure you won’t have to live on the street upon retirement], and buying department store clothes vs. branded clothes that your colleague does) and being psychologically disturbed whilst affluent (e.g., erroneously thinking you really need to buy a bigger second holiday home, have to work harder to earn more money so you can go Christmas shopping in Paris to buy your 100th pair of shoes, buying expensive stuff you really do not need but only because your friend has it). The book is more about the latter version. As typical examples for places with high levels of such materialism & greed and being ‘infected with the affluenza virus’, the USA, UK, and Australia are given, and for examples in the other direction, where there is somehow an absence or only a very limited version of the virus, among others, Denmark and parts of Russia. Even after the 500 pages, I still don’t know for sure what it is why some people do have the virus and some people don’t, other than a bunch of possible candidates. The topic and claims are worth investigating further, however, and James’ message—to ensure mental health, one must pursue one’s needs rather than one’s wants—is well-timed in these years of recession.

Fiction

The hunger games trilogy by Susan Collins (2008-2010). Three brilliant page-turners, of which the first and second ones are the best. Read it if you haven’t done so yet. The movie isn’t a substitute.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (1988). A highly recommendable, sweet, feel-good story.

Eclipse by Richard North Patterson (2009). A fictional story set in Nigeria about the murky business of oil and politics and injustice, inspired by the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Not happy readings, but gripping and I hope for the Nigerians that life isn’t as bad as the book portrays it.

Mieses karma by David Safier (2007). A German novel about a careerist women who, upon dying, returns first as an ant (with her human-life memory), and has to work her way up through the animal kingdom (mouse, cow, etc.) through selfless good deeds—or: building up good karma—to reincarnate as human being again and be happy with her husband and child. Overall, it has a serious implicit message, but it is told in a very entertaining, laugh-out-loud, way.

To anticipate second-guesses: 1) yes, I had some brain-candy with fantasy and paranormal stuff about aliens and the magic of Greek gods in a 21st century setting, and a few so-called airport novels, and 2) I have put Jared Diamond’s Collapse back onto the bookshelf after reading about half of it because it was too boring and annoying (unlike his Guns, Germs and Steel), and I can’t remember a thing about The secret life of the English language to write anything useful.

2012 in review (WP blog stats summary)

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog (see link below). The amount of visits is still impressive for the kind of blog this is, and feedback is on the increase. Hereby a big thank you to you all for visiting my blog and taking the effort to respond (both visibly online as well as the offline comments I received)!

I wrote fewer posts in 2012 than in the previous two years, but I do have the intention to stick to the ‘at least 2 posts/month’ frequency for 2013.

 

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 16,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

My snapshots for why I do what I do

A type of conversation that occurs not infrequently goes alike:

• Other person: “why are you here?”
• Me: Uh?
• Other person: “I mean, work at the university. You can earn so much more money when working in industry.”
• Me: Ahh. Well, I have worked in industry for 3.5 years. It was fine for a while, but not enough…

Then I fill in the dots to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the occasion. Related to answering such questions is Anthony Finkelstein’s “why I do what I do” blogpost: it consists of snapshots of positive aspects and events that made him feel it makes it all worthwhile being a professor in software engineering, which is a nice idea to give small hints toward answering it. Here I compiled some of my ‘snapshots’ of positive aspects, pleasant events, and encouraging feedback that have occurred that make me enjoy my job more than to give into a latent thirst for money and possessions and go back to industry (but note that I reserve the right to change my mind again). In random order:

The excitement when you’re the first person in the whole world who solves some particular problem or discovers something hitherto unknown.

After having covered topics like relational algebra, SQL, and distributed databases in the lectures, a student comments, baffled, “I thought databases was just about playing a bit with MS Access, but there’s so much more to it. It’s really amazing!”

I got to see the Sydney Opera House—wanting to see it since I saw a slide of it in my last year of high school during art classes—right before presenting my paper at a top-ranked conference, and the university paid for the trip to the other end of the world.

“We are pleased to inform you that you paper “xxx” has been accepted for …”

I stumbled upon a paper related to my PhD thesis, stating they use my theory to solve the problem they had.

A fourth-year student emailed me at the end of the course that he’s impressed that I’m a caring lecturer also going beyond what I have to do, and that he has yet to meet someone like me.

Socializing with colleagues from different disciplines, and brainstorming about joining forces to research and devise solutions to fix the major problems in the world.

I traveled to Cuba to, upon invitation, teach a course in my research area to well-prepared and motivated students who were eager to learn. And an extension one of the course’s projects even resulted in a joint paper.

A paper cites one of my papers as if it is the default/standard paper to cite on that topic.

Free access to most of the primary sources of scientific information regardless the discipline.

I can investigate issues that I fancy looking into, and even can earn a living with it.

Seeing students surpassing their own expectations and becoming aware of the capabilities they didn’t think themselves they had but actually do have.

Meeting up with colleagues and having stimulating conversations about pressing problems and known unknowns in our oh-so-relevant sub-sub-sub-field of our discipline, alternated with pub talk on the ‘tales from the trenches’ and nerdy trivia.

I know what the box is made of, what it does, and can make it compute what it should compute.

I travel to different countries and meet many people from all over the world, reconfirming time and again we are all very human, and live in and share this world together.

Thanks and Best Wishes for 2012

Many thanks to all of you dear readers for reading my blog and especially those who took the effort to leave comments, comments on comments, and provided off-line feedback. I hope you have found it was time well spent, or else enjoyable procrastination. According to the WordPress summary of 2011, the most visited new post was the one on the Essay on the non-violent personality, and there have been some 14000 visitors in 2011.

Given that it is that time of the year again for a little public reflection, my 2011 was, on the whole, very positive, with the move to South Africa and having commenced as Senior Lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In addition to the usual productive research and teaching and community services, I’ve been catching up on (South) African politics, history, and socioeconomics, started learning isiZulu, and trying to get to understand this complex society here in SA.

As for the blog, the amount of posts is lower compared to previous years (though with the topics just as varied), which is due to all those other activities and because I am writing lecture notes for this year’s ontologies and knowledge bases course, which otherwise would have made it piecemeal onto the blog (like these ones on ontology engineering). The deadline for those lecture notes is mid January, so stay tuned for upcoming updates.

I wish you all a happy, productive, and prosperous New Year! 

I’m counted

South Africa is conducting its once-in-10-years census from 9 to 31 October 2011. Today, when I was walking home from the supermarket, two census people walked in the street where I live looking for people to count, but seemingly not having much luck as few people were at home or unwilling. (Regarding the latter, Hayibo already has been poking fun at the news updates on Census 2011.) They were fine with questioning me on the street as they missed me earlier and it saved them walking back another 200m in the hot sun or repeat visits in the hope I’d be home.

First, there were the usual questions, like name, age, marital status, country and province of birth, since when I live in South Africa, and so forth. And then the census person kind of anticipated my response on what my first language is. “English”. “No”. “You sound as if it is”. “Oh. It really isn’t”. So, ‘other’ was ticked, and English as second language. I protested slightly, as the first words and coherent sentence I uttered in another language than my first were in French, and then German, and then English, and then Spanish, and then Italian, and then Zulu. The form did not cater for that. My mind started wandering off to database design and accuracy of the data. Ah, well.

Then there was the race question. Not that I have figured it out how it works here, and after this event, even less so. For instance, some students who look definitely Mediterranean to me, are proudly Indian, and some people who have a pale skin complexion assert vehemently they are Coloured. So I thought I’d better not bother start trying to box anyone (including myself). But the question had to be answered. The census person read aloud the question: “Are you Black, Indian, or Coloured?”. “Uh, huh?”, turning my head to see the question on the sheet, which had five possible answers. Again, “Are you Black, Indian, or Coloured?”. “Uhm, I’m from Europe. European?”. “Ok, ‘other’”, which was ticked off, and that’s fine by me. Somehow, ‘White’, whilst being in the list, was, to her, not an option worth mentioning and considering to tick off, as apparently I am clearly not White. South Africans with as much of a melanin deficiency as me start their phrases every now and then with “we Europeans…[fill in anything that doesn’t hold for all Europeans]”; are they the Real Whites^TM? And, by converse, I am a Real European^TM, who is then, by definition, not White? Confusing.

The remaining questions were fairly standard, or sensible to ask in a country like South Africa (e.g., in the Netherlands, they would not ask whether I have piped water and am connected to the electricity grid; here, many still have to make do without). I am still wondering about the whole list of equipment though. That the census wants to know whether I have radio, TV, and Internet access at home makes sense in the light of information dissemination, but what’s so useful about knowing who has a DVD player? In the light of COP17 next month, it would have been nice if they had included ‘bicycle’ in the list, instead of only ‘motorcar’. There was no question about how one travels to work and how long it takes, although the answers could have been useful in the planning of the country’s infrastructure.

I got two barcode-stickers at the end: one for the door and one for my passport. The first one acts alike the ‘no Jehovahs, Evangelists, door-to-door salesmen etc.’ stickers one can observe on several front doors in some European countries, the second one for cross-checking that I will not be counted twice or not at all. It’ll be interesting to see what the statisticians are going to do with all the data.

Questionable search terms for my blog

WordPress provides a range of blog statistics, including which search terms people used to arrive on my blog. Over the years, I have seen sensible, or at least explainable, search terms, and a bunch of funny or plain weird ones. Regarding the latter, it clearly demonstrates limitations of string-based and statistical methods for web searches, and to some extent that Internet users could do with some training on how to search for information.

The top searches of the past 5 years and >100 or >>100 times used are: ontology, keet, aardappeleters, parallel processing operating system, ontologies, and philosophy of computer science, and then there are often recurring strings that are quite similar but count as different hits, mainly about women’s achievements, failing to recognize one’s incompetence, granularity, and [computer science/ontology] with [medicine/ecology/philosophy/biology]. This is understandable given the topics I have blogged about.

More interesting from a computing perspective are those that are sort of, or even plain, wrong—and their reasons why. The remainder of the post is devoted to a selection of the more curious ones that I collected intermittently over the past 2 months (in italics), and added comments to several of them (in plain text). They are divided into “search engines are not oracles”, “what were they thinking?”, “curious”, “plain wrong”, and “miscellanea”.

Search engines are not oracles!

• should i be a scientist or an engineer
• what should be done with the outcome of assessment and how to use the outcome of assessments. The announcement of my ESWC2011 paper comes up, but is unlikely to give the user the answer they were looking for (there aren’t that many people interested in experiments with foundational ontologies).
• how useful is philosophy in computer science. This post on what philosophers say about computer science turns up when I searched for it, which does not deal with the usefulness, let alone the amount of usefulness of philosophy in computer science. The next search string is a bit more sensible in general and with respect to the blog post’s content:
• is computer science a science by different philosophers
• reasons for wildlife ontology development.  There are posts about the African Wildlife tutorial ontology and the IJMSO paper that has a list of reasons for developing an ontology, but they have not been put together to give you reasons for developing a wildlife ontology.
• ecology lessons good? The post on ontologies for ecology turns up, not in the least bit answering the question—those authors learned valuable lessons using ontologies in ecology research.
• do i read too much? and can you read too much. This post is on the first page of results where I explore of one can read ‘too much’, only slightly more skewed toward ‘answering’ the second search string than the first.

What were they thinking?

• writers who do not read
• too much work blog
• undergraduate computer science research least publishable unit.  Since when do undergrads care about LPUs?
• useful typology. The typology of bureaucracies turns up in my Google search results; if it is a useful one remains to be seen.
• random structure of website. My blog was not on the first 5 pages of Google when I searched (but it is by now known that Google customizes the search results).
• response to the dirty war. Which dirty war would that be? There are three posts on the response to the dirty war *index* that I have my opinion about (here, here, and here).
• computational food. Perhaps the user was thinking about computation with data about food? The only one that might fit, sort of, is the post about culinary evolution. There are interesting hits on the first Google page, though, such as about computational models of microwave food processing and computational food engineering.
• notify me if someone searches for me on google

Curious search terms, but somewhat understandable

• non violent essay. An essay itself is never violent; there’s a post on the non-violent personality though.
• incompetence blog. Uhmm… I fancy thinking this is not a blog about incompetence. There is a post about the Keller-Dungan effect (on being incompetent and unaware of it).
• incompetence not realize
• methontology ping pong. Googling for it, this post comes up, of which it is unlikely that it served the user, because it covers realism-based ontologies and methodologies (such as methonotology) that has a blog comment lamenting the “self contained ping pong matches among academics”.

Plain wrong hit

• anatomical structure of an owl. This is a nice example of the limitations of string-based and statistical approaches compared to semantic searches.
• salami techniques in information system. I googled it again, and my blog does not appear on the first 5 pages, and there is no post even remotely close to the search term.
• slinging techniques. It is not on the first 5 pages of Google when I searched, and there is nothing about slinging techniques on any of the blog posts.

Miscellanea

• ponder ontology. It appears that ponder is an object-oriented language to describe policies; I write about ontologies and do ponder about things, but have not put them together.
• granular book. I did announce a book about granular computing, but not about books that may be granular.
• ontologies funny photos. Are there funny photos of/about ontologies?
• 4. dimension

The problem of listing these odd ones is that the search algorithms will not change in the very near future, and thus that, due to this post, more people will be misdirected to my blog. But perhaps this manually assessed list of odd search terms might, some time, help in improving the algorithms and summarizing the content the links point to.

Five years of keet blog

Was it worth the effort? Yes, for two reasons. First, there is the amount of offline positive feedback and the steadily increasing number of visits/month, hence having provided some added-value at least to some readers. Second, it contributed to making me a more efficient and attentive reader and conference attendee, and it improved my communication skills in describing scientific results informally and succinctly. To be clear, though, it most likely did not improve my job prospects directly (perhaps even on the contrary) and the time spent on writing the blog posts surely could have been used to churn out another paper; irrespective of these two considerations, it was fun to do.

The vast blog-o-sphere is an impressive 127 posts richer thanks to the existence of keet blog. Some posts received many more hits than I ever thought it would generate (top-down and bottom-up ontology development, CS & IT with/for biology, and musings about multi-tasking vs. parallel processing and the brain), while others much less (like the one announcing I successfully defended my PhD thesis, on the transformation relation, and relation migration). The surprising thing, to me at least, is that despite (the general idea) that blog posts have a short reading/attention/lifespan, many of my posts somehow have been picked up by search engines and keep generating traffic thanks to those searches, including the older ones. Sensible search terms people used to arrive at my blog include, among many, ontology, ORM, handbook on KR, dl2010 etc., but there are also rather peculiar ones that still refer to older posts like this month’s search terms “incompetence blog” that presumably returned the post about the Dunning-Kruger effect I wrote about in mid 2008 and “random structure of website” (this post from >2 years ago has something to do with it). If there were some sort of an ‘ISI blog impact factor’—say, hits/day over the past month—then keet blog would be utterly insignificant, whereas with a ‘more-sensible-than-ISI [blog] impact factor’ spanning, say, 5 years, then my blog would be less insignificant on the absolute scale of blog impact.

Relatively, though, the past year generated consistently >1000 visits/month, and last month even >1600 visits, which is not that bad for a mostly ‘boring science blog’—even if only 10% of the visitors would actually read the posts. To make it less ‘boring’, there are occasional posts on science-society-entertainment (such as the complexity of coffee and culinary evolution) and trivia (e.g., htmlgraph). Posts on Computer Science & Society generate wildly varying amounts of visits (such as the Aperitivo Informatico, SA women in STI, or the ICT for Peace entries). A teasing headline like “what philosophers say about computer science” works surprisingly well. By the way, do you remember who said: “The future of our home country necessarily has to be a future of scientists”?

What about ‘pure’ computer science posts, including the shameless self-promotion of announcing accepted papers I am (co-)author of? Some posts have generated relatively many visits: all posts about ontology-based data access, all posts of the Semantic Web Technologies course that provided merely an introduction to each lecture, and CS conference blogging posts.  One well-visited post made it almost verbatim into a EU project deliverable and several posts (e.g., here, here & here, and here) were preludes to papers that have been published in the meantime.

As for my own research, the number of hits of the posts is more often than not at the lower end of the scale, with granularity (my PhD thesis topic) and ontology engineering mixed. So, well, yes, indeed it seems that writing about just about anything except my own research papers makes the blog ‘popular’. If you think that sounds depressing, then think again: the vast majority of scientific papers are mostly ignored anyway, and the other researchers’ work I chose to write about is a very small selection not only of what has been published but also of what I’ve read (and I read a lot).

I have updated the list of all blog post for easy reference (and thereby possibly rescuing the odd post from complete obscurity.) For those of you curious how many visits one or the other post got: the vox populi page contains a list with the 20 most visited posts and their respective number of visits.

I have not decided if I want to go on with it for another five years, but neither did I think keet blog would last for five years when I created the blog on WordPress on April 8, 2006, and started shortly after that with a first note. Many a blog fizzles out quickly, so I am somewhat proud of having kept it up for 5 years and steadily increasing its popularity—one post at a time.

Last, but most certainly not least, to all readers and [on-/off-]line commentators: a big thank you for your interest and feedback!

2010 in (blog) review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health [they generated it, I added a few comments further below]:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2010. That’s about 29 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 32 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 122 posts. There were 15 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 10mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was September 27th with 104 views. The most popular post that day was 72010 SemWebTech lectures 3+4: Ontology Engineering Top-down and Bottom-up.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were meteck.org, en.wordpress.com, teaching.case.unibz.it, netvibes.com, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ontology, aardappeleters, concept map template, ontologies, and philosophy of computer science.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

72010 SemWebTech lectures 3+4: Ontology Engineering Top-down and Bottom-up November 2009
1 comment

2

Multi-tasking or parallel processing? Operating Systems versus processing in the brain. July 2006

3

Computer Science with/for Biology and (bio)medicine May 2006
2 comments

4

An analysis of culinary evolution July 2009
1 comment

5

72010 SemWebTech lecture 1+2: the Web Ontology Languages November 2009
2 comments

My additions to the WordPress generated summary:

The top 5 of the posts written in 2010 (given that none of the above is):

1. Easy widget for keeping track of visited countries
2. South African women on leadership in science, technology and innovation
3. African Wildlife Ontology tutorial ontologies
4. From the Description Logics Workshop 2010, Waterloo
5. The complexity of… coffee

This blog is nearing its 5 year existence in April 2011, so I will refrain from reflections for the moment. Since it seems to be going quite well with the blog–well, relatively for a “dull sci/tech” blog, as some would categorise it–I have not made any particular new year’s resolutions for it other than continuing with what I was doing already anyway. On the very short term, I probably will not post much these weeks because I will be moving to South Africa and start with a new job at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Best wishes for the new year to all my dear readers and [on-/off-]line commenters!

Finally, I’m on Facebook too

After years of resisting, I finally succumbed to it: I created an account on facebook. Here’s my (slightly modified) badge:

I readily admit Facebook is fun, but it also confirmed my suspicion it’s a ‘distraction’. So, instead of spending time on preparatory work to write an informative blog post, I browsed around there, checked out other people’s links, chatted, and posted links myself. Links that otherwise might have been ‘upgraded’ (?) to an entire post, such as about the Newsweek’s article that women will rule the world and the open letter to cut military R&D, not science funding (in case of ‘necessary’ cuts in science, that is).

The next post will have more information content than this one (I suspect I am saying this to myself as well).

Easy widget for keeping track of visited countries

Following up on my whining last month about not being able to find a suitable and easy Web 2.0 widget to record the countries I have visited, I’ve stumbled upon one the other day that comes reasonably close!

Douwe Osinga, who works at Google, made an interactive applet for selecting the countries visited (for the USA and India also the states), and the generated code can then be copied into your home page, blog, and facebook. Updating the generated figure can be done by pasting the previously generated html back into the appropriate box, clicking on the new country/ies, and then pasting that code back into your home page, blog, or facebook. And no login hurdles etc have to be overcome.

Thus, it is not entirely interactive and cross-linked and all that, but it will do fine—and most certainly better than the lame Paint-job I did last month. So, here goes the updated picture (not including the holiday that I would like to take now), where at the bottom you will find the standard link to create your own map: (map updated on 30-6-’12)

visited 36 states (16%)
Create your own visited map of The World or Free android travel guide