Second Laptop: ASUS ZenBook UX331UN

I was hoping that a post from when I got my first laptop, an ASUS U30JC, would provide a template for how to review my new, second laptop. Sadly, that post was from over 8 years ago, when this blog was just a year old, I had not yet started college, and my writing was much worse. With that in mind, I now provide a review of my new laptop; this review will be by no means a thorough review of hardware, but will be more of a summary of my experiences installing Linux on it and using it for around a month.

A few months ago, I noticed that part of the plastic frame around the screen of my old laptop, along with the hinge below it, had partially detached. A little over a month ago, that detachment had become much more noticeable, to the point of becoming a liability for me: the laptop would no longer close properly (without me risking breaking it altogether), so I would not be able to take it anywhere outside. Up until that point, I had experienced no major hardware issues with that laptop, and only minor issues such as the optical drive occasionally being unresponsive; I could tell that it was struggling a little more with newer software, but on the whole, it was performing quite well, so while I had from time to time over the last couple of years been looking casually into replacing it, this sudden development forced the issue. Given my disability, I wanted something a bit more lightweight, because my old laptop was 4.5 pounds, which was a bit heavy for me; that said, I still wanted something that would offer a reasonable amount of computational power, and while I didn't anticipate requiring a high-performance graphics card for gaming as I am not a serious gamer, I figured there may be some casual games as well as the possibility of getting into GPU programming for my work for which I may want a reasonable dedicated graphics card. Luckily, I found the ASUS ZenBook UX331UN, which seemed on paper to fit the bill on all counts, and I found only a few left in stock online for a reasonable price (just over $1000), so I went ahead and bought one. Follow the jump to read more.

My Time at the 2018 SHPE Convention

About 4 weeks ago, I got an email asking me to help Princeton University's School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS, of which my department, the Department of Electrical Engineering, is a constituent) recruit undergraduate students attending the 2018 Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) Convention to apply for graduate school in SEAS; that convention happened the previous weekend in Cleveland, Ohio. I first thought it was a little strange that I should get this email, given that it was somewhat short notice and especially given that I am not Hispanic nor have I done anything with SHPE in the past. However, after clarifying these details, I decided to go, because I do care about increasing representation of people from marginalized & underrepresented backgrounds in graduate education & academia, especially given my disability (as disability is just another aspect of diversity and too often leads to societal marginalization).
I had a lot of fun at the convention. I went with our SEAS diversity chair, a postdoctoral researcher in my department, and 13 undergraduate students; the former two people and I were there primarily to recruit, while the undergraduate students were there for their own benefit to meet corporate or academic recruiters and learn about (and hopefully secure) positions after graduation. It was definitely nice to see so many enthusiastic undergraduate students from all over the country coming with so many questions about graduate school, and I enjoyed getting to know those in my travel group more, such that I didn't feel left out even though I was essentially the only one among them who hadn't previously done anything with SHPE. There were some events that may have been more relevant to me that I missed due to the travel schedule, and I didn't find that many companies of interest to me when I explored the giant career fair (the focal point of the convention) on my own, but I did take solace in finding a few. Plus, it was nice to get out of Princeton and briefly explore a city that I hadn't really seen before (barring a short trip when I was very young, which I barely remember). Overall, I'm glad I went, and hope to have similar opportunities in the future.

FOLLOW-UP: Sexual Harassment, Power Dynamics, and Institutions

Last year, I wrote a post motivated by a case of sexual harassment and assault committed by a professor in my department against a student in his group. The incidents happened in the spring of last year, but the news about the incidents and the nominal punishment only came at the end of the year. Since then, there have been further developments, as described in this article (by Marcia Brown in The Daily Princetonian), so I am writing this post as a follow-up regarding the specific developments of this case and our department's response, even as my post last year was my attempt at exploring the broader issues at stake. Essentially, Princeton University had reason early this year to investigate further claims of past consensual relationships between that same professor and other direct professional dependents (students & postdoctoral associates), and suspended him for the spring semester and summer as they conducted their investigation. The university concluded the investigation with findings of guilt on his part of having engaged in at least one such consensual relationship, and as that is a violation of university rules, he was fired. Follow the jump to read more about my thoughts regarding this; as mentioned above, compared to my previous post on this subject, this post will have more of my raw emotional reaction to this whole process and to the specifics of this case rather than a more measured take on the broader issues at stake.

Book Review: "Medici Money" by Tim Parks

I've recently read the book Medici Money by Tim Parks. It's a book that covers the rise, consolidation of money and power, and downfall of the Medici banking family in Florence in the 15th century. It focuses on the main players in the Medici family as they relate to their banking business, and how that business grew, became intertwined in politics & religion, and was able to fund the collection & creation of artworks and other cultural artifacts; the whole story is just a long power play, with jockeying between Medici family members, popes & cardinals, politicians, and competing nobility & business interests.

The book itself is a well-written, engaging, fun jaunt through that period in history; by the fact that it only has a casual section at the end containing bibliographic notes, without having a formal bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes, I can tell this was written for popular rather than technical/academic consumption, which I can appreciate. It was particularly interesting to see the tensions, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the Catholic Church's views on usury (in the old sense of lending money at any nonzero interest rate) explored fully in this book: the argument is that usury allowed ordinary people to become wealthy without needing to inherit it or work as hard, upending the social order, while the Catholic Church depended on usury to fund its own wars & extravagant lifestyles even as it condemned the practice (though even people at that time struggled to find coherent Biblical justifications for injunctions against usury), leading to weird debates about whether some commercial practices like speculation on currency exchanges were really usury in disguise. My only quibble is that the author ties the notion of usury too much to currency: the way I see it, currency simply liquefies commercial value across space (i.e. making value available across different geographic areas), while usury liquefies commercial value across time (i.e. making value available to future buyers), so while currency certainly makes usury much more feasible by combining liquidity in space and time, it is conceivable to imagine usury without currency, simply through bonds between people expecting greater future returns to be settled through consensual barter. Overall, I think this book could be an interesting and fun history for a general audience.

Book Review: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

I've recently read the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. This is a classic treatise from 1962 expounding Kuhn's view of scientific progress not as cumulative and incremental but instead as comprising paradigms in each field and discipline which drive most scientific research while being subjected to drastic changes from time to time; this is the book that popularized the notions of scientific paradigms and shifts therein. It starts with a description of what "normal science" (in the sense of science comprising and being driven by existing paradigms) is, defining the notion of a "paradigm" in the context of science, and how people do science in that framework. It then moves onto the notion of a scientific crisis, and shows how that may or may not develop into a fully-fledged scientific revolution. Finally, it shows how new paradigms may take root and how scientific revolution may ultimately be resolved in one way or another.

While Kuhn did not perform serious sociological research for this treatise (though the book seemed to me like an informal sociological review of the scientific community at large), and while he later in life turned his attention more to fundamental questions of scientific philosophy, he was a historian of science and identified most strongly as that; I feel this may have helped shape this book into something far more clear and engaging for a layperson like myself than what I may have expected from a book about the philosophy of science, as the book is chock-full of relevant and easy to understand references to the history of science (though it may also have helped that Kuhn, having been a theoretical physicist before becoming a historian of science, focused almost exclusively on the historical development of theoretical frameworks in the physical sciences). Moreover, because this was meant as an extended essay, this book is not particularly long, though it is reasonably well-referenced with illuminating footnotes too; in fact, the chapters are called sections, as would befit an essay/treatise. One question to which I kept returning through the book was about how to distinguish between discoveries that answer open questions within a paradigm versus those which more fundamentally threaten the existence of such an established paradigm; Kuhn masterfully addresses the various aspects of this question in a clear progression over the course of the book, to the extent that I almost felt like he was speaking directly to me in order to answer my questions as I read the book. I do have a few criticisms of the book, though these should themselves be taken with a grain of salt and subjected to criticism too, as I am a layperson in the context of the philosophy of science; follow the jump to read those. Beyond that, though, I think this is a really interesting and valuable perspective on the practice of science at the level of groups/communities, and would be useful for anyone interested in how the sausage of science is made, discarded, and remade.

Third Paper: "Phonon-Polariton Mediated Thermal Radiation and Heat Transfer among Molecules and Macroscopic Bodies: Nonlocal Electromagnetic Response at Mesoscopic Scales"

My third paper has been published! It is in volume 121, issue 4 of Physical Review Letters, and an older preprint of it is available too for those who don't have access to academic journals (it has all of the same figures and ideas, though it is missing a few sentences of further explanation as well as a couple of new citations that were inserted for the final publication). As with my previous papers, in the interest of explaining these ideas in a way that is easy to understand, I am using the ten hundred most used words in English (except for the two lines that came before this one), as put together from the XKCD Simple Writer. I will use numbers sometimes without completely writing them out, use words for certain names of things without explaining further, and explain less used words when they come up. Keep reading to see what comes next.

In the paper that came before this one, I looked at how to do a better job of figuring out the van der Waals (vdW) forces, which are the forces that let geckos (small animals with hard skin over which your finger can slip easily) stick to anything no matter what it is made of, between molecules, which are the little things that make up most of the stuff we see and are in turn made of smaller things called atoms. I tried to figure out how these forces look at distances where the fact that molecules are made of atoms is important, but if those molecules are near much larger bodies, the fact that the larger bodies are made of atoms and molecules should be less important; it turns out that at those distances, how fast light goes matters a lot, and using ways to figure out these forces exactly instead of using easier ways to figure out those forces makes a big change in what those forces are. That paper was able to show how to bring together all of these different ideas from considering large and small bodies in a single way where none of those ideas can be ignored. That would be important when considering new kinds of molecules like graphene, which is made of a lot of carbon atoms in a thin sheet, or really long molecules like DNA or those found in foods, when those molecules are near larger bodies that we make.

This paper looks at the same sorts of molecules, but not at vdW forces anymore. Instead, in this paper, I look at how heat (through light) goes between different molecules, especially when they are near larger bodies. For that, I need to do a better job of considering how molecules can make changes on each other through light, and that means that I need to better consider how the full atoms within molecules move toward and away from each other in a way that repeats itself. By doing that, I can now show how heat through light goes between different molecules, whether they are close together or far away from each other. When people considered heat going through light between larger bodies, they found that the heat would keep growing as the bodies came closer together, and that growing wouldn't stop; from knowing how things work every day, we know that once bodies come close enough, they touch each other, and the growing stops at some point. In this paper, I've shown that when molecules come close together, the heat grows for a while, but if they come close enough, that growing does stop, so I've been able to show what distance we can say two molecules touch each other, so that heat going between molecules happens through them touching instead of through light. This is really important for things like graphene, which are used as part of things used for making power from the sun by getting its light and heat, and also for making new things that can become part of computers made of really small things like molecules that work because of heat going between different parts.

Featured Comments: Week of 2018 July 8

There was one post that got two comments (from the same commenter) this past week, so I'll repost both of those.

Review: Linux Mint 19 "Tara" MATE + Xfce + Cinnamon

An anonymous reader said, "Mate has been the best since it replaced gnome2. It scales better across different computers and has many parts that just work. One minor thing is to select the themes only in each of their parts. Controls/panel, window boarder and icons mainly. And to not use vetted parts. But there's so much to choose from and it's just looks. Just about anyway you want", later adding, "I meant don't use broken themes. That's all." (I have since replied with a comment clarifying all of those points.)

Thanks to that reader for those comments. I don't really have any other posts planned for the rest of this month, but I do hope to have a book review or something else for next month. In any case, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: Linux Mint 19 "Tara" MATE + Xfce + Cinnamon

It has been some time since I last reviewed a Linux distribution. That is in large part because I've found that the Linux distribution landscape is not as dynamic as it once was, with fewer new distributions vying for market share, while older established distributions have simply continued to exist and develop. As a result, unless you readers have particular suggestions for distributions that I should review (as long as it can be done via a live USB) or a distribution particularly catches my eye, I will likely be sticking to reviewing Linux Mint each time a new release comes out, until and unless Linux Mint declines in quality so much that I need to start looking for new distributions.

MATE: Main Screen + Linux Mint Menu

This time, I'm reviewing the latest edition of Linux Mint, focusing on MATE to test the distribution and its applications as a whole, while more briefly touching upon the DE-specific experiences of Xfce and Cinnamon. I used the USB Image Writer tool on my installation of Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" MATE to create the live USB system; based on the language used (e.g. "destroying" all data on the USB drive), I suspect this is just a nice graphical front-end to the "dd" command. Follow the jump to see what it's like; although 32-bit versions are available, I consistently tested the 64-bit versions.

Book Review: "The Half Has Never Been Told" by Edward Baptist

I've recently been able to read the book The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist. It is a thorough account of the history of chattel slavery in the present-day US from the 17th century through the Civil War. The main point of the book is to challenge three common assumptions in prevailing historical narratives of slavery, namely that its incompatibilities with liberal democracy in the 1850s were points of universal agreement in the North at that time and drove the Civil War, that its worst aspects were its denial of civil liberties & rights to black people, and that it was bound to fail eventually for being an inefficient economic system. The author counters this, marshaling numerous statistics from that time and corroborating analyses too, to show that slavery was in fact an efficient and dynamic economic system that went hand-in-hand with capitalism and national expansion, and further uses the stories of individual slaves (often left out of conventional historical narratives) on top of the available statistics to show the violence and brutality inherent in slavery as extending far beyond the mere denial of rights (as that denial of rights remained even in the Jim Crow era succeeding slavery).

The facts are presented in a very straightforward manner, and the narrative structure is remarkably coherent and engaging; this makes the emotionally weight of the book all the more apparent. I was particularly surprised to see not just how much of financial speculation familiar to modern readers was present with respect to the products of slavery in the 19th century, but particularly to see that even the slicing and dicing of securities that was practiced on subprime mortgages leading up to the 2008 financial crisis & recession were practiced almost identically with securities representing fractions of average slave labor products in the 1830s (even leading to financial panics then too). Moreover, while I was abstractly aware of the lack of happy endings for most slaves and the conditions of enslavement that would prevent successful revolts or emancipation, the reality of this didn't truly hit me until reading this book, seeing so many stories of slaves whose histories were obscured after a final sale or flogging. It was also quite interesting (and depressing) to see just how much slavery and the desire to maintain unity across the country drove the national political & economic conversations right up until the Civil War, and how much the North economically depended on the products of slavery until they started getting many more immigrants and gaining political power in turn; that discussion really puts into perspective just how simple lies the narratives of the Civil War being "for states' rights" or "of Northern aggression" were. The content is of course depressing to read, but that only enhances its importance; I really believe that this should be taught in schools & colleges to remove a lot of the myths and misinformation about slavery that are promulgated in schools throughout the country, and for that reason, I certainly recommend this book to anyone (though one must be mentally prepared to read about the horrors described).

Book Reviews: "An Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper" by Roberta Corvi & "Philosophy and the Real World" by Bryan Magee

I've recently read two books about the life and philosophy of Karl Popper. One is An Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper by Roberta Corvi (translated from Italian to English by Patrick Camiller, while the other is Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee. Both have some similarities in form and structure. They are both relatively shorter books (under 200 pages, each in hardback form). They both devote a single chapter as an overview to Karl Popper's life, and then devote subsequent chapters to his philosophy of science, philosophy of politics, and the broader themes of his philosophy. Furthermore, they were both written during Popper's life, with some level of consultation with him.

As a layperson when it comes to philosophy, I found Corvi's book, which I read first, to be a bit of a struggle to understand. The prose used in the book is often unclear, and I especially found the first 30 pages to be so densely packed with jargon and assumed background on philosophy that I was tempted to put the book down at that point; thankfully, my persistence paid off, as I found the rest of the book to be progressively clearer. Additionally, there are some tonal shifts throughout the book that I found a bit odd; Corvi does not uniformly praise nor criticize Popper's philosophy, but while her criticism is generally clear, her praise merely restates his philosophy as if it were self-evident fact. I'm not sure if the abstruseness of Corvi's book is due to her own writing style and assumption of a more philosophically-educated audience, due to issues with the translation, or due to the translator's own deliberate choices in tackling the subject of Karl Popper. The book claims to be an accessible introduction to Popper's philosophy, but I'm not sure if that really means accessibility for lay readers (as opposed to philosophy students early in their careers).

By contrast, Magee's book, which I read second, has much more clear and accessible prose. In particular, there were a few misconceptions that I had about Popper's beliefs from Corvi's book that I felt Magee's book cleared up, such as the extent of Popper's rejection of Marxism and disdain for socialism as a political practice versus his belief in essentially social democratic ideals. This book is also shorter, and because Magee was a student of Popper, the narration of this book seems more self-consistent and intimate, reflecting Magee's emotional and ideological closeness to Popper, and it even includes a few points where he makes explicit mention of discussions with Popper; Corvi's book, in comparison, is much more dispassionate and disinterested. However, that intimacy in turn raises questions about the impartiality of Magee's narration. For example, Corvi spends a little time questioning the philosophical foundation of Popper's belief in indeterminism, while Magee completely sweeps this under the rug; this appears to be a broader trend, as Corvi does generally do a better job formulating her own and addressing other people's criticisms of Popper's philosophies.

Both of these books were written before or around the time of the end of the Cold War. This makes the political views espoused in the book somewhat dated; of course hindsight is 20/20, but that throws into especially stark relief the rather inductive nature of the arguments positing ever-increasing rationality and liberal democracy around the world. The arguments that the development of ideas, logic, technology, structures, and so on are indicative of human evolution seem similarly inductive, especially considering that these changes have happened over such shorter time scales compared to typical evolutionary changes observed in humans (over tens of thousands of years and more), and this may also be because understanding of evolution was less sophisticated at that time than it is now, though I'm not entirely sure of that considering that I'm not in the field of evolution. In any case, these books' ages show, and it isn't clear how much of the description of evolution and politics comes in each book from Popper himself versus each respective author's interpolation & interpretation; I'd be curious to see more modern books that address these recent issues. With these issues aside, overall, I think Corvi's book gives a fuller picture, but Magee's book is the clearer introduction for a philosophical layperson like myself.

Book Review: "Hume" by James Harris

I've recently been able to read the book Hume: An Intellectual Biography by James Harris. This is an "intellectual biography" in the sense that rather than focusing on the particular details or daily life of the Scottish philosopher and essayist David Hume, it delves into his philosophy and writing in the context of what he read, the people with whom he corresponded, and the political history of the Great Britain in which he lived. This is extensively sourced from Hume's very brief autobiography, his more extensive works, and correspondence with and writings by other people; Hume's own will requested that his personal papers and unpublished works (apart from those he wished to see published posthumously) dating prior to the 5 years leading up to his death be destroyed, and this seems to have happened, and Hume's autobiography is far too brief and sparse to serve as the primary resource.

I am not in the humanities, so I come at this book as a layperson. This being an intellectual biography makes it a longer and weightier book than a biography that would focus on Hume's personality and daily life. Moreover, the author feels free to introduce contemporaries of Hume, often by last name only, without much more context to their own lives and thoughts. However, to the author's great credit, the prose is clear and engaging even to a layperson like myself, and the author takes care to outline the philosophies of Hume's contemporaries to the full extent that they relate to Hume's readings, correspondence, and overall philosophical development. Additionally, the author makes clear the historical and political circumstances surrounding Hume's life, so that even someone like myself without that background can reasonably follow.
The author's main goal in this work is to show how Hume approached all of his work and interests with an eye toward philosophical examination of the broad principles governing them, without trying to claim that all of Hume's work sprang from a single unified moral philosophy, nor that Hume turned away from moral philosophical treatises toward essays on politics and religion purely in pursuit of fame. The latter refutation is made clear enough by Hume's avowed disdain for histories that were written in a very superficial way purely for mass popularity. The former refutation comes out over the course of the book: the author points out, where appropriate, and respects Hume's own wishes that his essays be read as independent entities from each other and from his other work, and the author further seems (from my rudimentary perspective) to follow Hume's own moral philosophy of interpretation via human experience. It's clear that other philosophers will use their own perspectives to try to ascribe a broad unified philosophical foundation to all of Hume's work, but I think this author does a good job of making and justifying his overall goal in this biography. It is a fairly long book, but I think anyone who is interested in philosophy and is ready for a work that is a bit more densely packed with history and politics would enjoy this book. Follow the jump to see a few more musings that are not directly related to this book.

My Time at the 2018 APS March Meeting

This is a quick update from my trip to the 2018 APS March Meeting in Los Angeles, California at the beginning of March. I felt like I learned many lessons from my trip to the 2017 APS March Meeting and was able to apply them here. Chief among them, I realized that a large part of this conference is networking, whether that involves the formation of new relationships or the maintenance of old ones, so I got to enjoy myself more in meeting with old friends and collaborators and making some new connections as well; that also meant that I focused more on going to talks of immediate relevance to my research interests as well as my friends' talks to show them support, and I didn't worry about trying to fill each day by attending talks and sessions like I did last year. I was able to present my work this time too: I presented a model for vibrational contributions to radiative heat transfer and van der Waals interactions among molecules, along with interesting results in specific systems. This was in a session that included people from both the microscopic van der Waals and macroscopic Casimir communities, and while I was the only one who discussed heat transfer per se, I did get to see a nice mixture of the two communities, and some interesting discussions did come out of that. Overall, I had a great time, but I do think that as I progress further in my graduate research career, it may be good to not only continue to attend the APS March Meeting in the future but look into more specialized conferences too.

Halfway through Fourth Year

I realized that I hadn't written anything broadly about my progress through the PhD program in a while, so I should do that now. I'm halfway through the fourth year of the program, and this year has allowed me to take on more responsibilities compared to last academic year.

For one, I'm now doing more projects than I was last year. In particular, last year, my main focus was on fleshing out a way to combine atomistic and continuum treatments of electrodynamic response in order to understand van der Waals interactions among molecules and larger bodies (which was the subject of my second paper). I did a bit of work on the side extending this to situations where the molecules may deform, and while that work still hasn't been published yet, it was not particularly difficult to understand what was going on there given the broader picture of mesoscopic van der Waals interactions. In any case, I was able to basically focus on one major project whose path and end goal seemed fairly well-defined, and as a result, I was able to take things a bit easier. By contrast, right now I'm working on two parallel projects incorporating vibrational effects into this description of molecular response and seeing how that affects the van der Waals interactions as well as heat transfer between molecules. This required quite a bit more formulation and writing & testing code on my part, and featured significantly more uncertainty in the results, because while the basic formulation of van der Waals interactions between molecules and macroscopic bodies for my previous project could be relatively easily extrapolated from our collaborators' description of interactions among molecules alone (and the resulting physical interactions were relatively more predictable), I wasn't really sure what to expect with respect to the modification of these interactions due to vibrations, nor what to expect for heat transfer or thermal emission at all; this is because as far as I can tell, other people haven't really considered molecular vibrations in such a context in an ab-initio manner thus far. Thus, I've felt like in terms of research, I have a lot more work and more uncertainty on my plate now than I did a year ago.

For another, I was a TA for the first time last semester and am a TA again this semester. This semester is turning out to be particularly interesting in that regard, because while last semester I was a TA for a graduate-level quantum mechanics class where I could basically count on students knowing what they were doing and not needing me to hold their hands at every obstacle, this semester I am a TA for a freshman-level linear algebra class that is being taught as an engineering class for the first time; not only am I assisting with a class for which the curriculum is being developed afresh, but this class has a diverse group of freshman who are from less-resourced schools and may have less formal math and science background than some of their peers here, so beyond ensuring that I be an effective pedagog for freshmen, I now have to make sure that I can connect with these students by making myself feel inclusive rather than forbidding.

Most broadly, I now have to think more seriously about what I want to do after I graduate, as that point comes nearer. The big question is whether I want to stay in academia or not, given both the locations where I may find interesting opportunities and the nature of such opportunities. For a while, I thought that I would more likely want to leave academia given the tough odds of finding a tenured faculty position in a place that I would like to be, so I at least thought of doing an internship this coming summer outside of academia. While I still haven't ruled out the latter idea, I have come to realize that I enjoy academic research enough to consider continuing it for at least a few years after graduation, and I've also realized that it isn't necessarily a good choice to try to divine my career many years in the future based on my assessment of my current research progress, as that future becomes less certain the farther away it is. Given that, I also feel like a summer internship could disrupt the pace of my current research, so I would want to engage in it if I could be reasonably sure that it would actually help with my current research. However, if I forswear a summer internship to focus on my current research, then I have to really make sure that I fully investigate my options following graduation; for example, I have a few ideas on research topics to pursue following graduation, but I have no idea how feasible they are because they're in an adjacent field with which I have essentially no experience, so I need to get to know people in that field and make those connections to facilitate my next move. I'm going to the 2018 APS March Meeting next week, so with the uncertainty about my research projects & directions in the short- & long-terms along with the need to more seriously network with researchers in the field, this upcoming conference does feel like it has higher stakes for me than the one I went to last year, when I wasn't as worried about such things.

Such seems to be the course of research in a PhD. I'm glad that I've been able to take up these responsibilities and become a more well-rounded researcher & educator, and the uncertainty of research is gratifying to the extent that I get to investigate different ideas with the chance to fail and improve further in the hopes that I will ultimately hit upon something successful. However, the flip side of that uncertainty is stress when I realize that I have to deliver in some way, whether that means making a good impression & networking effectively at a conference or seriously considering upcoming career moves (where I again would have to make a good impression upon whoever may be evaluating me for a job). Ultimately, my hope is that I can continue to work hard & stay focused on what I need to do without letting that stress and uncertainty cloud my decision-making in the hope that my hard work will pay off, in the same way that in my second year, when I was stressed about my slow research progress relative to some of my peers, I simply pressed on and was eventually rewarded (through the fruit of my labor) with a publication at the beginning of my third year; even if that payoff doesn't come in the way that I expect, my hope is also that by that point, I will have cast a wide enough net that other options will be available to me too.

Book Review: "The Death of Expertise" by Tom Nichols

I've recently read the book The Death of Expertise by Tom Wainwright. It's a polemical discussion of why large groups of people in the US, regardless of political affiliation, seem to be not merely indifferent but actively hostile to real learning and to the notion of expertise. It discusses, by chapter, the breakdown of communication between experts and the public as well as among members of the public, issues related to the commodification of the college experience and the associated rise of "safe spaces", the rising distrust of experts as fomented by talk radio and later by cable news and questionable blogs/"news" sites, the problems facing mainstream journalism in this respect, and the problems facing experts themselves in making sure to get things right and communicate expertise clearly to the public. It's not a particularly long book, and its writing style is clear & accessible. However, there are a lot of problems I have with the book, specifically revolving around many of the arguments being thinly sourced, internally hypocritical, and mutually contradictory; additionally, the author's frequent conflation of expertise in practice versus pedagogy lessens the credibility of many of his arguments. I detail these and other issues below; as a result, this post is going to be a bit longer than is typical for a book review on this blog. Also note that what I write before the jump will be my main criticisms of this book; other thoughts about the material (less about the book itself) will come after the jump.

In the early chapters, the author defines an expert as someone who professionally uses a specialized body of knowledge, but this seems to unduly discount those who amass specialized knowledge in fields for their own sake/pleasure and ascribe value in expertise only to those who are lucky enough to make money off of it; this implicitly discounts the role of luck, in turn implying that only those who can professionally use specialized knowledge deserve to do so as experts. Later in the book, the author points out that amateurs have transient interests while professionals are paid to do their work well with dispassion/disinterest even when they're not feeling "into it". That initially seems like a fair argument in favor of professionalism as a measure of expertise, but upon closer examination, this argument makes it too easy to claim that failures of expertise are isolated events that are few in number and can be overlooked in the face of the much larger number of successes in expertise, without truly grappling with the widespread societal impact of such failures (that might have led to present or future distrust of expertise), whether those are mistakes like the FDA recommendations to avoid eggs coinciding with an explosion of obesity & diabetes (as discussed in the book) or cover-ups like big oil & tobacco companies suppressing research showing their products to be directly harmful to the environment/human health (which are not discussed in the book).
The author also characterizes expertise by talent, longevity/experience in a field, acceptance by peer experts in the field, and so on, but the emphasis of the intangible quality of "talent" seems to feed into the pernicious notion of expertise being closed off to all but a predetermined few elites, rather than making clear that while developing true expertise is difficult, as it requires a long period of very hard work, it can in principle be done by anyone. (I will return to this point later in this review.)

A recurring problem through the book is that the author seems to conflate expertise in doing something with expertise in teaching to others, and while development of communication & teaching skills often goes hand-in-hand with development of the specialized knowledge & practice itself, high-level practice often does not overlap all that much with high-level pedagogy, as pedagogy requires a specialized skill set all unto its own. As I will discuss shortly, this problem is particularly prominent in the third chapter.

While the first two chapters, about communication breakdowns between experts and laypeople and among laypeople, have reasonably solid arguments and citations, the third chapter, about the issues with college education, seems shorter on citations of studies than the other chapters, and apart from the discussions of studies showing shorter and less rigorous assignments in many classes in universities across the US, the other arguments seem to be typical of modern critiques of the commodification of the university experience in the US, supported more by pieces from surveys and op-eds that seem more like opinionated reflections potentially riven by confirmation bias/cherry-picking of supporting narratives of their own. In particular, these sources, as cited in the book, do not compellingly demonstrate that these issues in colleges are really characteristic of most US college student experiences, and subliminally insinuate a causal link between the supposed infantilization of students at universities and their long-term rejection of authority without conclusively demonstrating (or even explicitly clarifying) such a causative link. Of course, I may be demonstrating my own confirmation bias in large part because I think the concerns over "safe spaces" and similar things are overblown (and the concepts themselves could, when done right, have some positive value for cultural tolerance), but even leaving that aside, I felt like the picture was rather incomplete, especially due to the overreliance on op-eds and other such pieces compared to rigorous peer-reviewed studies, relative to the other chapters.

For that reason, I initially thought that the book might be stronger without the third chapter, but reading further, the book never really recovers from this, as the following chapters are also a bit thin on rigorous citation material. Given the goals of this book, that is really the most damning thing about the book, because if it is generally thin on rigorous research for citations, or its citations themselves cite rigorous research but the author hasn't made that clear, then the author falls into exactly the trap of either spouting opinions which he is not necessarily qualified to make (by citing random op-eds with which he agrees, which he scolds members of the public for doing in their discussions with each other) or being a patronizing expert assuming that public will trust him enough to not question his lack of clarity regarding the trustworthiness of him and his citations, making this very book an exemplar of why many people distrust experts.

Also in the third chapter, the author conflates the issues that small colleges face in trying to attract talent, often dealt with by adding programs that they cannot sustainably support in order to use the term "university", with the hypothetical notion of two people with the same major claiming equivalence to each other even if one went to a more selective & prestigious university than the other. Even if one can question (as the author does) the equivocation of the two degrees on statistical grounds, ultimately the author also claims (earlier in the book) that college credentials are an imperfect measure of expertise in isolation and that expertise should be judged on the basis of individual demonstration, so the author fails that standard and falls into the trap of creating a strawman conflict between those two hypothetical people without properly assessing them as individuals. Moreover, in that same hypothetical scenario, the author claims that the accreditation of the major in both hypothetical colleges is not enough to claim that people graduating from that same major from the two colleges are equal, yet offers no further compelling justification; furthermore, this directly contradicts the author's prior use of college accreditation boards as an example of institutional peer expert approval, which damages the credibility of this line of argument through the book.

In the context of the third chapter, as I return to the author's conflation of expertise & expert teaching, the author had mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect as a symptom of a failure of metacognition (understanding how oneself thinks), yet it seems like this conflation of expertise & expert teaching and the consequent scolding of seemingly dense students is in itself a failure of metacognition on the part of experts like himself, in believing (in a Dunning-Kruger-esque manner) that expertise in a certain field automatically bestows upon such experts the right to believe that however they communicate their expertise to students must be correct and that students who question the quality of such teaching must necessarily be written off as dense & entitled. This is also reflected in the author's questioning of the value of student evaluation of college instructors, because while it may well be true that most such evaluations are meaningless as they are affected by factors irrelevant to the actual learning of the material, his lack of distinction between expertise & expert teaching (from the perspective of both experts & students) allows him to fully discount students' ability to assess teaching quality purely due to their lack of expertise in the specific subject matter, and then add further insult to injury by using the most egregious examples of irrelevant student evaluations of teaching to negatively stereotype such evaluations.

Another example of the author's mistaken conflation of expertise & expert teaching is when the author claims that many people overestimate their singing abilities, believing themselves to be good enough to appear on a nationally-televised competition like American Idol, yet these same people don't believe themselves to be good enough to be voice coaches. However, if the Dunning-Kruger effect says that people who are bad at something overestimate their abilities at that thing due to a failure of metacognition, then it seems certain that there are some people who are actually good at something (e.g. savants or child prodigies) due to some intuitive/instinctive understanding but who, through a failure of metacognition, cannot recognize or clearly communicate exactly why they have the skills that they do.

In the fifth chapter, the author discusses issues in traditional journalism, including saturation, competition & fragmentation in the market, the rise of talk radio (leading in turn to cable & online punditry) giving rise to deep distrust in expertise, and the fact that many journalists go right into major news organizations from university journalism majors instead of first interning at smaller organizations and thereby not understanding how journalism necessarily works on the ground. In the context of the latter point, the author admits to not having expertise in journalism (and admirably refrains from directly criticizing modern journalistic practice beyond pointing out well-known journalistic scandals), but defends his arguments by claiming expertise as a consumer of news, which seems to again contradict his argument that students of expert teaching cannot be trusted to properly assess said teaching. Also, the author seems to frame the story as if the number and scope of incidents of journalistic malpractice is clearly increasing, but the examples taken are from a variety of journalistic outlets, as opposed to a large number from one or two major outlets, so it would be more interesting (and convincing) to see whether such incidents of malpractice or mistakes have actually become more frequent within major outlets that have existed for many decades.

In the last chapter, the author investigates the failures of experts, from fraud & deception to overextension of expertise either into other fields or too far within a field into the realm of questionable broad predictions to innocent scientific disagreements, though the overextension of expertise too far into broad predictions often overlaps with the overextension of specialized expertise into other fields.
There were two issues that I had with that chapter that were relatively more minor in the broader context of the chapter & book but which I felt needed to be addressed. The first is the author's claim that science should only be about explanation and never prediction, which I contest because while the author's actual focus is on overly broad prediction of major phenomena in the world extrapolated from narrow technical expertise, the author gives the erroneous impression that science is never meant to make predictions (which is false, given that the whole point of science & engineering is to make and then test falsifiable predictions based on existing evidence, whether to explain the natural world or to design & test new technologies), which again seems like an example of the author making pronouncements outside his area of expertise. The second is the author's cautioning against overly broad oracular predictions by experts, accompanied by a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb railing against experts who would make predictions over time horizons of decades if they can't predict what will happen over the next year. I dispute this because the predictability of broad trends over longer time scales can be easier due to averaging over larger short-term fluctuations. An example would be how the uncertainty in short-term weather prediction does not preclude accurate prediction of long-term climate change; this is itself a broader example of how the existence of chaos in a system implying exponential growth in the difference between two initially nearby trajectories does not imply that the exponential growth continues forever, as the trajectories themselves could be bounded through stretching & folding. By contrast, the narrow view in that quote is almost like denying the existence of physiological farsightedness by claiming that anyone who cannot see something nearby cannot possibly see things far away.

The author concludes with an epilogue reviewing recent events, like the 2016 election, Brexit, and some of the deceptions practiced in promoting the Iran deal, to point out how difficult it would be to educate people who are resistant to real education & critical thinking, while still hopefully pointing out that our society can still be saved as long as experts start to reengage with the public and laypeople actually start to critically reengage with experts and with their own civic responsibilities in turn (though I would add that this goes for experts too). My biggest issue with the epilogue is that the author warns against false equivalency, like in debates over climate change, GMOs, vaccines, and so on, yet he himself partakes in this numerous times in the book, like equating the well-documented problems with Linus Pauling pushing vitamin C with unsubstantiated assertions that Noam Chomsky's political activism is somehow wrong, which seems rather hypocritical.
There are two other broad points in the conclusion with which I disagree, though that has more to do with differences in political & pedagogical ideology. I believe the author, in believing in essentially fixed talents of people and especially in quoting Andrew Sullivan several times in claiming that democracy needs elites to save itself from its worst excesses, is unduly pessimistic about the possibility of experts and laypeople reconnecting, because I believe (having read works like Whistling Vivaldi, participated in things like the MIT-K12 Project, and so on) that such reconnection should be possible if people see the value in education & critical thinking, that anyone really can develop expertise so long as they actually put enough hard work into it and can demonstrate their value to the field at hand, and that the initial onus is on experts to start reengaging with the public not by being patronizing scolds but by actively investing time & resources into developing pedagogical skills to channel that expertise in ways that are understandable to the public; this follows my aforementioned problem with the author's definition of expertise as focusing too much on the notion of "talent" as a fixed quantity. Also, I do think a lot of this pessimism is due to the sole focus of this book on current American society, which is fine given its goals, but it feels a little incomplete as issues like the Dunning-Kruger effect, fragmentation of media, and so on, seem like they could happen anywhere, so especially in the context of Brexit, I would have liked to see discussion of how these issues may or may not have played out in countries in Europe (or Canada, for that matter, which has a fairly similar culture to ours in many ways), with appropriate discussion of what other underlying political/cultural similarities & differences may explain such phenomena. I've also read elsewhere about how a lot of prior public support for STEM & education was due to the threat of the USSR in the Cold War, so when that threat dissipated, so did such support; with that in mind, it might have been nice to see him discuss the local political & sociological aspects of the Cold War in the US given his own expertise on the Cold War, yet he instead retreads more stale pedestrian arguments

Overall, I thought the book was rather disappointing, probably in large part because in the wake of the 2016 election, I read a bunch of articles & op-eds about the topics covered in the book, including anti-intellectualism, the Dunning-Kruger effect, "safe spaces" in colleges, and so on, so I may have felt a bit overexposed to the topics in the book, and I didn't feel like I came away with anything really new. This, combined with the aforementioned numerous flaws in the book (which were not helped by the author's own frequent use of personal anecdotes aggrandizing himself in a way that started off as an obvious joke but became more grating as the flaws became more obvious), also means that while this book could in principle be a nice synthesis of these ideas for people unfamiliar with them, in practice the flaws seem to undercut the value of this book beyond simply reading similar individual articles & op-eds online as I did. It's an OK book, and in the interest of critical engagement with opposing views, I'd suggest that other people read it to form their own judgment, but with arguments that are often thinly sourced, internally hypocritical, and mutually contradictory, that engagement need not be particularly deep or sustained: the author tries so hard to convince people that he's not an old curmudgeon and that he legitimately wants people to understand how experts come to judgments on matters in their expertise, but his use of thinly sourced contradictory arguments makes his scolding less credible, especially when he scolds people for doing exactly those things.
The above paragraphs are my main criticisms of the book. Follow the jump to see a few more thoughts about the broader material at hand.

Revisited: Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" KDE

Main screen + KDE Main Menu

Long-time readers of the Linux distribution reviews on this blog know that I am a fan of Linux Mint, but I have had somewhat mixed experiences with KDE. When I've reviewed a new release of Linux Mint, I have occasionally reviewed its KDE edition in addition to its GNOME/MATE/Cinnamon and Xfce editions, generally finding that the KDE edition has too many minor bugs and not enough compelling features compared to the more mainstream editions. Apparently the Linux Mint developers feel similarly, as this is the last release of a KDE edition for Linux Mint; henceforth, they are only releasing MATE, Cinnamon, and Xfce editions for a tighter focus on GTK-based DEs and applications. With that in mind, I figured it was worth reviewing a KDE edition of Linux Mint one final time. I tested it on a live USB system made with the "dd" command. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Book Review: "I Contain Multitudes" by Ed Yong

I've recently read the book I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. It is a very broad and reasonably (for a general-audience text) deep exposition of the history and recent work in microbiology and biochemistry, covering the multitude of ways that microbes originated, shaped, and continue to affect life on Earth. In particular, it covers the impact of microbes on diverse ecosystems from shallow coral reefs to island jungles, and frames analysis of human digestive and immune systems in terms of island ecosystems as well after accounting for the associated microbiomes. Its broad goal is to show just how essential microbial life is to other life (often with reference to how model animals can be bred to be sterile but consequently have health problems), to the extent that organisms cannot really be characterized to have the functions that give them their identity without their microbiomes.

This book is moderately long, but it is quite engaging and reads quickly. One of the things that I really liked about this book was that the author was careful to be nuanced about developments in the field, without dampening his obvious enthusiasm for the subject as a whole. Whether it was through descriptions of the scientific controversies over "hologenomes", accounts of the problems with probiotic dietary supplements in general consumer markets, or the subtle ways that different forms of symbiosis (mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism) exist on a sliding scale, blend into each other depending on context, and are almost always built on foundations of managed/tamed conflict & cheating (even in the case of mutualism, which is too often cast with Pollyanna-ish connotations), he didn't try to cover up such issues, yet that didn't detract from the overall narrative. One thing that did seem weird was that the author at various points cautioned against using militaristic imagery for describing the immune system given the complexities of the immune system microbiome, yet there are a few places where he falls into that trap anyway; it isn't clear whether this is by accident, or if this is an acknowledgment of how entrenched such imagery is in the popular imagination that there aren't any suitable alternatives for writing to a general audience. Another was that the author, at a few points, repeated a few sentences or a short passage at the beginning of a chapter nearly verbatim near its end, though I will say that because he didn't overdo this, it added to the narrative by underscoring key ideas rather than seeming like bad writing. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in science, nature, or human health.