Green St. Restaurant

Over Thanksgiving break, I drove up to Pasadena to hang out with friends from 'Tech. While I first had dinner with a high school friend at Matsuri, I forgot to bring my camera to take pics of the food. (yeah, I know, stupid mistake) Anyway, on my last day there, I went out to eat with some friends since it was Drock's birthday the next day. Due to various conflicts and time issues, we ended up going to Green Street Restaurant rather late (8:30). Apparently their kitchen was closing, so we ordered quick and for one of our friends who hadn't shown up yet.

BTW, Green Street Restaurant is known for their large salads, as you will soon see from the pictures.

Martin started out with a cup of corn chowder. He had originally planned to have the dinner Dianne (a smaller version of the Dianne salad, something of a signature dish) and a cup of clam chowder, but he can't read, so there you go. Eventually he settled for the corn chowder, as the soup of the day was tomato bisque, and there wasn't anything else in the same price range to accompany a salad.

(since the dinner Dianne is the same salad as the regular Dianne, just in a smaller portion, I'm only including the picture of the full-size salad.)


The Dianne salad:


The Cornucopia salad:


All salads come with zucchini bread. (two slices w/ the regular, and one w/ the small)

Drock had the parmesan crusted chicken, a dish I was eyeing until I spotted seafood further down on the list of specials. It looked and tasted pretty good (according to Drock), but he can't focus my camera worth squat, so all I have is this blurry picture:


I had the pasta primavera w/ seafood. It sounded appetizing and looked pretty good, but was overall pretty bland. There was a small pool of olive oil and melted butter at the bottom of my plate that I tried to dip food into with each bite, but I ended up just putting black pepper on everything. The shrimp and scallops were overcooked. (scallops especially, so I wasn't too happy about it)


But it was Drock's birthday dinner, and the kitchen was closed, so what are you going to do. One of my other friends thought that they don't do a good job cooking the chicken (for the salads), which may be true. I wouldn't be too surprised if it were. The last time I came I had a salad that I liked, so I guess the food is hit or miss? I would say the place is somewhat pricey given the quality of food, although the restaurant seems pretty high-class. The food just isn't up to par, even if the plating is quite good.

Green Street Restaurant
146 South Shoppers Lane
Pasadena, CA 91101

Ultra-rare Delicacies

In the interests of Thanksgiving, here's a food-based post based on the following conversation I had with a friend:

[18:32] lhopitalified: i wonder what [giant] isopods taste like
[18:32] friend: probably
[18:32] friend: delicious

in our discussion of deep sea organisms. Big-ass crustacean? It has to be tasty! According to wikipedia, all I need to do is travel to northern Taiwan to try some Giant Isopod. DELICIOUS!

Of course, there are other ultra-rare delicacies to be had based on the rarity or difficulty in catching certain animals. Panda meat, for example, is quite clichéd, so I have some others up my sleeve:

Foie Gras (Ankimo style) - Ankimo (monkfish liver) is delicious. I assume Foie Gras has a similar richness, though I've never actually tried it. Since monkfish naturally have fatty livers, probably as an adaptation for buoyancy underwater, if you force feed it for two weeks and then harvest the liver, I would imagine it would make for some excellent Ankimo. Of course, it should also be prepared in the standard foie gras styles (mousse, parfait).

Peking Duck-billed Platypus - This one is mostly on the list because of the ingenius portmanteau I came up with for the name.

Giant Squid Chowder - The key here is the serving. Instead of a bread bowl, I wonder if you could use a carved and cooked part of the Giant Squid itself. I'm not too sure how it would hold up with a hot soup inside, but I think it would be pretty neat.

Sammy Sushi

For the first couple months in SD, I languished without the comfort of relatively close-by Sushi Komasa back when I was at 'Tech and the summer when I took the metro to Long Beach for work. (Sushi Komasa is in one of the main plazas in Little Tokyo, a couple blocks east of the Civic Center Red Line Stop and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Also, expect an upcoming post on Sushi Komasa.)

Googling for Sushi Komasa yields Kirk's website, which is lucky for me, since Kirk is based in San Diego. Hell, if his wife loves albacore as much as I do, then their sushi recommendation must be pretty good. They also love Ba-Ren, which dishes up some pretty good szechuan. (Expect that in an upcoming post, too.) [Edit: part 1 is up now]

Anyway, word has it, Sammy Sushi is on their regular rotation, so I decided to check it out. Overall, the feel of Sammy Sushi is more laid-back than Komasa, where there is what amounts to a musical chair-like rush for seats when they open. Sammy is slightly pricier, but on par for San Diego, where food is generally more expensive than in LA; in fact, I think Sammy might even be slightly cheaper than some other non-generic sushi bars. Regardless, I have always thought the nigiri at Sammy's is particularly fresh, especially whatever specials he happens to have. You can't go wrong with Albacore, Aji, or Toro when they're on special. Here is the Aji (Spanish mackerel, NOT to be confused with Saba, the standard mackerel) :


Aji has a creamier flavor, I think. Generally, I just don't like Saba, but Aji is totally different.

Because of his Korean ethnicity, Sammy also offers a Kalbi BBQ bento in addition to the standard teriyaki and katsu bentos. For $12.95, you get a lot of food. Here is the chicken katsu:


They ran out of pork, so my tonkatsu got turned into a torikatsu. It doesn't make that much difference to me, normally, but the chicken was overdone, not juicy, mostly tough inside, with a little too much crunchiness. I always enjoy the sesame-flavored salad dressing, the California rolls are standard, and the tempura was piping hot when this got served to me. This explains why there is half a tempura shrimp missing. :)

Oh yes, it also comes with miso soup.

I usually get the Tomato Roll (tuna on the outside, spicy scallop on the inside) since I am a fan of tuna, scallops, and spicy foods. I'm not sure who came up with this roll, as a friend of mine has mentioned that it is available in other sushi places, but it's not very common, but very very tasty. This time, however, I switched it up and went for #13 (shrimp tempura, avocado, cucumber on the inside, spicy scallop and tempura flakes on the outside with a sweet sauce):


If you see this on the menu, you will agree with me that the picture in the menu does not do this roll justice. It is quite delicious, although a little sweet for my tastes. I also recommend the Caterpillar, although what exactly is in it escapes my mind at the moment.

Sammy is also famous for his "One Night Stand" roll, where he or Kira (his sous-chef) comes up with something new, with the promise to not remember how to make it the next day. :)

Of course, this means, Sammy will also do custom requests, so if you have a particular roll you like that is not on the menu, they will be glad to make it for you.

BTW, I also had an order of Toro, which was some of the best I've ever had, very very melt-in-your-mouth creamy. Alas, it was so good, I forgot to take a picture. :)

Sammy Sushi
7905 Engineer Road
San Diego, CA 92111

All that is necessary for bogus quotes to proliferate is for lazy writers not to follow-up on sources...

Apparently, Edmund Burke's "famous quote" does not have an original source. It is probably a paraphrasing of some things that he has actually said. Nevertheless, it is reasonably famous, seemingly first appearing in Bartlett's Famous Quotations (14th ed, 1968).

Well, normally, this alone would not qualify it for a blog post. However, in the recent port of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to PSP as a bonus for Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, the "best" ending has an exchange between Alucard and Richter Belmont that includes within it, the following dialogue:

Alucard: "[...] The only thing necessary for evil to triumph..."
Richter: "is for good men to do nothing."

So, I say, why attribute a fine quote like that to Edmund Burke, when you can attribute it to the son of Dracula and a Belmont! Since this version of SotN has a redone translation, I will have to check my PS1 copy to see if it is the same in the original. Also, bear in mind that a literal translation of the Japanese voice-acting does change the word-order so exactly which half of the quote belongs to whom is a translator issue.

Symphony of the Night remains a highly-praised game, having seen release on multiple systems. If you haven't played it yet, either the XBOX 360 Live Arcade version or the Playstation 3 / PSP download from the online Playstation Store should suffice.

Although the port in Dracula X Chronicles has redone voice acting, translation, and some changes to the gameplay, it also costs three times as much, since it is actually a bonus to another game. I have to say, however, that the main game in Dracula X Chronicles is not all that fun, suffering from some major gameplay issues that weren't fixed when they decided to remake the original Rondo of Blood. Besides, it can only be a bad thing when such famously "bad" voice acting lines are replaced:

Dracula: "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets! [...]"

Anime-induced epilepsy

Nowadays, it is fairly common to see a warning that appears before the opening sequence of an anime. For example, consider the following warning that precedes Minami-ke:

(Minami-ke is one of my favorite series of the fall season. The character-based comedy is very well done, and it doesn't seem like it's going to take a nosedive like Zetsubou Sensei.)

Ok, so what is the origin of such a warning. Well, when reading a book, it is advised to have a decent amount of light so as to not strain the eyes. However, because a television emits its own light, there is usually plenty of light to see what's going on in the TV. As far as distance is concerned, I don't think there is any real reason for keeping the attended region small on the retina, so much as ensuring that strain is not occurring due to focusing on a nearby object for an extended period of time. (Books are generally another story, because there is constant movement of the eyes, I think.)

I checked out some of my anime DVD's and wasn't able to find a warning, so presumably, it only happens for the Japanese television broadcast. One way to check my hypothesis would be to examine anime broadcasts recorded prior to 1997 and broadcasts made after 1997 to see if the presence of the warning jumps from zero to a high percentage.

To understand the origins of this warning, I think we need a trip back to 1997, when the now infamous "Dennō Senshi Porygon" (でんのうせんしポリゴン) episode of Pokémon was aired in Japan. At some point in the episode, an explosion occurs that results in flashing of bright red and blue lights at 12Hz for 6 sec total. (4 sec for most of the screen, and 2 sec for all of the screen) Of course, these are prime conditions for inducing photosensitive epilepsy: high contrast, red color (certain wavelengths work "better" than others), a frequency between 5 and 30 Hz, and flashing across a large portion of the visual field. The episode is now banned worldwide, and hundreds of Japanese children were treated for symptoms, although mass hysteria resulted in some 12,000 individuals reporting symptoms. You can find more details on wikipedia's articles for photosensitive epilepsy and Dennō Senshi Porygon. The large number of epileptic victims was probably due to the extreme popularity of Pokémon, a show whose primary audience falls right into the population that is most susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy. The "best" part of the story is that, in a stroke of pure stupidity, Japanese news programs that reported on the story later that day, replayed the scenes in question, sending a second round of epileptic victims to hospitals.

Ok, so what then, does the warning accomplish. By increasing distance to the television, the amount of visual field occupied by the television is decreased. Also, increasing ambient light decreases the resulting contrast of scenes presented. While these changes serve to alleviate the inducing of photosensitive epilepsy, it probably is not terribly important, as I'm sure television producers are now aware of the conditions to avoid so that viewers don't develop symptoms.

Math in Reideen

Here is a screenshot from the 4 minute mark in Reideen, a remake of the original Reideen anime from the 70's. Besides the fact that student multiplied by a binomial including a radical ONLY to resort to the quadratic formula, can you spot the error?

Also, I do not condone doing that much mental math when multiplying polynomials involving radicals. That's how you make errors. (The final answer is correct, but one of the equations is incorrect.)


I'm also somewhat disturbed by this "hint" from a friend. I hope it's a joke from the fansubbers...

The PTL Synaesthetic Color Space

Because we don't have enough color spaces, I have come up with another one of my own. Relying on precise measurements of colors that are induced by tones of varying pitch, timbre, and loudness in sound-color synaesthetes, it should be possible to create an alternate color space. I don't believe that the same is possible using grapheme-color synaesthetes, because although such synaesthetes are, overall, more consistent in their synaesthesia, there is not good space for graphemes to begin with that will also provide for a smooth gradation of colors. Sound-color synaesthetes on the other hand, do appear to have smooth gradations, which should yield a pretty good mapping. In order to boost their consistency in color-matching, we just need to look for the ones that also have absolute pitch.

How to write/grade an exam

As a professional student (17+ years) and teacher (ok TA, mostly) (4+ years), I have some experience with the proper creation and grading of an exam. Ignoring my own biases towards open-book all-free-response exams, there are some things that are just plain bad examples of test writing:

Disclaimer: I have attempted to be vague when giving examples as I know some professors are trying to stop proliferation of questions since they reuse exams.

1. "trick" questions

For example, the ever-common riddle: which is heavier (i.e. more mass), a kilogram of feathers, or a kilogram of lead? The correct response is neither, since both "objects" weigh one kilogram. However, it has a propensity to trip up people who do not read and understand the question carefully, since heaviness dne density. So there are people who do understand the difference between mass and density, but trip up because they rush, are under pressure, etc. and there are people who don't understand the difference between mass and density. If you consider both groups the same, I guess the question is ok, but what you really want to test is conceptual knowledge, NOT how nitpicky their reading is. People get enough of the latter on the SAT and other standardized tests.

The real life example comes from a multiple choice question regarding a certain topic. The question asks which of the following is NOT correct, with the following answer choices: a', b, c, and none of the above. In the notes, it is clearly stated that a, b, and c are correct. However, it happens to be the case that a' is a slight variation on a that could be missed by a careless reader. It may be the case that the professor is TRYING to catch the students who do not understand the difference between a and a', but with a multiple choice question, you can't tell how many students who get the question wrong do so for conceptual reasons and how many get it incorrect for other reasons. (Moreover, both a and a' are irrelevant, as the actual concept should be x, which is only vaguely related to a.)

2. "matching" questions

Have you ever had those questions where you have a list of blanks and a corresponding word/answer list? There are a number of problems wrong with this type of question. First, the process of elimination (i.e. pigeonhole principle) can be used to successfully guess at some of the answers. While you may concede this as a bonus to the student, really it is a bonus to students with successful test-taking skills. Moreover, if the number of blanks = the number of possible responses, it is impossible to get exactly one incorrect, unless one is intentionally getting one incorrect. If one does a plausible one-to-one matching, there are at least two incorrect matches or zero matches. The correction for this is either to increase the number of possible answers (which also removes most of the benefits for process of elimination) or to allow multiple answers for each blank. The latter was tried out by my at least two of my science teachers, which has the upside of making sure you understand the concepts exactly, but the downside of MASSIVE penalties as both missing and incorrect matches are marked incorrect.

In a more abstract sense, some teachers add a caveat that extra, incorrect information is ignored, and points are only deducted for missing correct information. This has the extreme downside of promoting massive bullshitting as students try to brute-force as many points as possible. It also leads to a bad habit of massive bullshitting as some students in classes that my friends TA for write extremely long nonsensical responses that must be read and graded.

3. "vague" questions

Don't ask for one thing if you actually mean another. For example, one of the questions on a midterm I took had the following: "Describe one example of x." What the question really meant, judging from the key, was "Give on example of one of the functions of x." These two questions are vastly different. For example, if x were "videogames", one might write a whole essay for the first question describing a videogame, its graphical and audio properties, the gameplay, design, marketing, etc. However, the actual intended question was the second question, in which case the student need only respond: entertainment, stress relief, addiction, occupation (gold farmers in China). Even if you mark both responses as correct, the student who interprets the question "correctly" saves time and energy and the student who interprets the question accurately wastes valuable time and energy on a poorly written question. (note: this question occurred on the same midterm that had "trick" questions, so one was both tested for and penalized for careful reading of the question.)

There are more examples of this type of question on the same exam, such as "corresponds" when the more accurate term is "induced by" or "resulting from". Neither of these corrections are actually that great, the whole question should be rephrased.

There are also minor examples of vague questions that are not that bad. For instance, one of the questions read: "name one strategy to accomplish y". Of course, a number of responses are possible, and it's clear that the question is asking for "name one USEFUL strategy to accomplish y", but a well-written test should seal all the holes, however tiny.

Of course, the flip side of the story is that there is also bad GRADING:

1. "cascade" questions

These types of questions occurred a lot in core physics classes at Caltech. The question goes something like this: part a) says solve for x, part b) says given that value of x, solve for y, part c) says given that value of x and y, what is their product z? If each question is graded independently, then the student who makes a mistake in solving for x, but does the other parts correct loses full credit. This is clearly unacceptable, as the student may understand all the necessary concepts for the later parts of the question, but is hindered by a mistake in the initial section of the problem. The correct grading scheme, which is work-intensive on the part of the grader, is to examine each section to see if the work is correct, even with false initial data. Caltech's way around it was to change part b) so that it read given THIS value of x, solve for y, where the value of x given to the student was not the real answer.

In a more abstract sense, students should be penalized according to the scope of their mistake. If it is a minor mistake, but the student clearly shows an understanding of the rest of the problem, minor points should be taken off.

2. "Better" answers

When testing for conceptual knowledge, there are usually key terms that the grader is looking for. For example, a question expecting a short response might ask "what is a regression line" might expect something along the lines of the "line of best fit", "line that fits the data", when a more accurate answer such as "the line that reduces the error function, which is usually the sum of the squared errors" could be given. Ideally, any of these answers should be marked correct if the expected answer is vague. (If the expected answer is specific, vague answers should receive only partial credit. More detailed answers should receive full credit. Assign bonus credit as you wish) Of course, this could also be interpreted as a poorly written question, as the level of specificity could be unclear.

Sometimes, "better" answers slip through the crack and it becomes the student's job to request retroactive credit. However, the ideal grader is able to use common-sense judgment to either mark a "better" answer as correct or to request advice from the professor when an issue is unlcear.

3. Question Analysis

We use a lot of multiple-choice tests in the psychology department. While I don't agree with using multiple-choice tests so often, they do have the advantage of making statistical analysis of the test easy. For instance, for each question, our grading software gives us the histogram of answers, so we can see which answer choices were distractors. Furthermore, it computes a correlation: testing whether performance on a question is correlated with overall performance on the test. A "bad" question is one where the overall-good students are incorrect and the overall-bad students are correct.

In situations where such detailed analysis is infeasible, the ideal grader should keep a mental histogram of the incorrect responses. Then, it may be possible to see how the question was misinterpreted, as sort of a last check for "vague" questions.

Math Club...

may now be meeting twice a week. Yikes!

Yes, I'm in charge of the Preuss middle school math club. I figured since Preuss is all about academic achievement, it needed a math team, but things are so competitive at the high school level, that it really only makes sense to start with the middle-schoolers. Currently, we meet on Mondays, but now the kids want to meet on Wednesdays as well!

I guess they were finally convinced today that they need some extra work after I gave them a warmup from the MathCounts handbook and they didn't do so well. Before, I used to cover some topics I thought were interesting, but they thought I was always pitching something too difficult. (probably true) Nevertheless, the problems I was giving them were not particularly harder than what they would see at an actual MathCounts competition.

Anyway, I am currently in contact with a different teacher to see if we can use another room for Wednesdays as the current teacher who is helping us is only around after school on Mondays. Hopefully we will be able to meet two times a week. Furthermore, if I can get the average warmup score into the 6+ range (instead of the current 1.5), I am confident that the kids can be reasonably competitive at the chapter level.

Izakaya Sakura

One usually does not go wrong with a restaurant that Kirk recommends. When it became part of their "rotation" and I realized that it had received multiple posts, I put a visit to this place on my to-do list.

Apparently, Sakura is in the Izakaya style, which I guess is something similar to a tapas bar. Anyway, I went during lunch since I needed to do some shopping in the area. (namely, chives, ginger, and dumpling wrappers for some gorgeous ground kurobuta pork)

I was eager to try the beef in sesame sauce, but it appeared to be absent from the lunch menu I was given. I settled for the ribeye steak, which is something that is only served on Sunday. (My hypothesis is that they get their shipment of beef on Sunday, and any leftover steak is turned into something else for the week.) But first, I started off with some appetizers.

First up was the agedashi tofu: three smallish pieces of deep-fried tofu, topped with a generous helping of grated daikon and shredded green onion and in a light broth. My first impression upon tasting it was that it was much less flavorful than the agedashi tofu at Sammy's (that post is probably coming in a month). My second impression was "ouch, I think I burned my mouth". Weakly-flavored food usually means one of two things: either the cook thinks the patron can't handle the flavor (ala "weak" mapo tofu) or the cook is confident in the flavor of the ingredients and doesn't feel the need to mask anything. The latter seemed to be true here, as the broth for the chicken kara-age was very similar, but somehow, worked really well for the deep-fried breaded chicken.

While the mayonnaise w/ cayenne? pepper is probably a more traditional sauce for deep-fried meats, the light broth with daikon works extremely well. I am unsure what is in the broth, since the daikon is a little overpowering. It ends up tasting very similar to the broth when my mom makes a slow-cooked beef with daikon soup, so I wonder if it isn't some form of pork or beef broth given that Sakura does have a slow-braised pork dish on the dinner menu. Either way, it makes me sad to hear that the sauce does not accompany the chicken during dinnertime.

Last up was the steak special. It looked fantastic, and flavorful enough without the accompanying sauce. The sauce this time was a strong ponzu, again with grated daikon. What looks like mashed potatoes on the side there, is probably mashed mountain yam, as you usually don't get stringiness with regular mashed potatoes. The miso was a little bland for my taste; I don't think the light flavor works so well for the miso as it does for the agedashi tofu or the chicken karaage sauce. The salad came with a home-made sauce, which you might be familiar with if you've ever had that sort of salad in a Japanese restaurant. This one had hints of egg and daikon, so I'm guess the main ingredients are probably mayonnaise, rice vinegar, cooked egg, and daikon. Since the sauce for the steak was so strong, I ended up just straining it for the daiko and using that to top the steak, which worked rather well. The steak was pretty good, no $40 filet mignon, but pretty good for a restaurant steak, if just a little bit overcooked in my opinion. For a piece of meat that thin, it really only needs a few minutes to bring it to a nice medium. At least the garlic on top wasn't burned as that is usually what happens when I try to cook steak without a real grill.

Overall, I was very pleased with the food, and the service was excellent. I had a friendly chat with one of the waitresses when they realized I spoke some Japanese, and they were very apologetic and nice about fixing my bill when I pointed out the miscalculation (in their favor).

The crowd was pretty large for lunch on Sunday; I would say that it was about 3/4 Japanese, and 1/4 asian-looking students. I guess business is going pretty well, and that word-of-mouth works for them, as they do not have a sign on the outside denoting the location. At some point I will have to return for dinner, as it seems that their sushi is also pretty good and to see what the dinner menu has to offer.

Izakaya Sakura (in between the military recruiter and the chiropracter)
3904 Convoy St #121 (same plaza as the original pancake house)
San Diego, CA 92111

Balsamic Vinegar rocks my taste buds

The first bottle of balsamic I got was a cheap ($1.69 I think) bottle from Trader Joe's. It performs well on salads, and I use it to add somewhat more of a kick to a more traditional vinaigrette I make using a fruitier vinegar. Silly old me, I thought that this cheap bottle I purchased was representative of all balsamic vinegars.

Then I tried the $14 caprese at the Quarter Kitchen in downtown SD. If you think spending over $10 on a salad (without added chicken/shrimp/crab/lobster meat) is crazy, let me assure you that this salad is worth every cent.

A traditional caprese is made using mozzarella, plum tomatoes, and basil, seasoned with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Wikipedia also tells us that the ideal caprese has buffalo mozzarella, and ingredients from specific regions in Italy. Also, balsamic vinegar may be added.

The Quarter Kitchen does their version of the caprese using two types of tomatoes, a very nice buffalo mozzarella, and oh yeah, a balsamic vinegar aged 25 years!

Unlike wines, where I can really tell the difference between crappy and good, balsamic vinegars are a whole 'nother story. Whereas my opinion of wines is relegated to either "I like it", "I don't like it", or "damn, this could get me drunk", the complex flavors of a balsamic vinegar really stand out. It seems strange to use this metaphor to describe food, but whereas my cheap bottle of balsamic vinegar tasted relatively flat, the aged balsamic vinegar was extremely deep, with a flavor that changes as you hold it on your tongue.

After going home, I did a little online reading about balsamic vinegars. Like wines, they also get really expensive (> $100 for 100mL), but I guess they don't quite approach the spectacle that is counterfeit Thomas Jeffersons.

Unfortunately I was unable to find what I wanted (a good, but still relatively cheap) bottle at the local stores, having to settle for a $11 bottle of three-leaf balsamic vinegar. (Don't get me started on why there is both a leaf system and an age system for classification.) While not quite the syrupy goodness I had at the Quarter Kitchen, I think it will serve very well in my homemade caprese.

For those interested in the Quarter Kitchen, I was inspried to go after reading this review. I think next time I will try the Lobster Club and maybe the Kobe Beef...

Social Networks

I attended Matthew Jackson's talk today on modeling social networks. Besides the obvious shortcomings of using models to simulate real-world phenomenon, it seems that there are some lessons to be learned after applying certain analysis techniques to real-world networks.

More specifically, the structure of a social network (connections and their weights) determines the speed of convergence for opinions (at least as abstracted by the model). This has some interesting ramifications in the two examples that Matthew provided.

In the first example (managers in a small firm), the influence (characterized by the final convergent opinion if only that individual had that opinion initially) of individuals varied significantly, and actually corresponding quite closely to the actual hierarchy of executives within the company (the CEO and vice-presidents all had high influences).

In the second example (teenagers in a high school), the visual representation clearly showed the a segregation of groups (mostly on the basis of race, at least that's what the coloring of the graph seemed to portray). This segregation seemed to limit the overall convergence, as the analysis indicated that the second-largest eigenvalue was 0.98. (in other words, in each cycle of opinion updating, the error for convergence decreased by 2%)

Matthew also discussed the conditions under which social networks could converge "wisely". Basically, if each individual had some initial state of belief that was randomly distributed but centered around the "truth", under what conditions would the social network converge to an "accurate" value of belief?

Essentially, the answer is: true democracy (surprised?). A key requirement is that no one individual has strong influence (otherwise the error in that individual's belief would propagate), and that large groups of people pay attention to a majority of individuals in the social network.

If we believe that this method of modeling real-life social networks approximates the ways in which actual social networks work, this poses a number of problems for disseminating accurate information. For example, if we take the case of HIV denialism, clearly the group of HIV denialists is not swayed by a majority of the world (who accurately believe it when *ALL* medical doctors agree that HIV causes AIDS). Moreover, this group includes some highly influential people, including some musical artists.

However, there may be some hope yet: given that real-life social networks are "flawed" in this manner, it only makes sense to use the tools we have rather than trying to dramatically alter the way in which society forms opinions. Wikipedia accomplishes this rather well, by establishing itself as a highly influential source of information, that maintains accuracy by receiving input from any and all users, thus allowing it to converge to an "accurate" state. In fact, since Wikipedia requires external sources to verify information, it removes the need for contributers to be randomly distributed with respect to their "accuracy". As individuals, we can seek to benefit society by establishing ourselves with high influence via maintaining popular blogs...

My plan to ditch Windows

Alright, let's be honest, in the past, an Apple computer never gave you quite the same performance/price point that the x86 computers had. However, that seems to have changed dramatically in recent years. Although Apple still suffers somewhat from not having a budget line (mac mini not withstanding), price-for-price, the mobile offerings are very competitive for their prices, especially when features are factored in. (such as hard drive size, bluetooth, integrated webcam, and overall physical size) Coupled with an ability to both boot Windows or run it virtualized, it seems silly to spend more than $800 on a Windows laptop, when you could pick up a Macbook for slightly more. Not only do you get a stylish computer, but you get a wider choice of operating systems. Even the Windows diehard can be satisfied, being able to boot directly into Windows, throwing out that Mac OS X cd and never looking back.

Sometime back, I told some of my friends that I didn't envision continuing on with Windows after XP. This was probably shortly after the freely available Vista RC1 crashed my computer hard, felt slow and bloated, and for what? a visual experience that felt like a cheezy overdone OS X? Now that Vista has been out for a while, and I've seen all the performance problems with it, I am all the more sure that my next desktop will be an Apple computer (having decided that Apple laptops were better ever since the debut of the TiBook). Obviously for computer gaming, it might still be necessary to boot to Windows, but there no longer seems to be a compelling reason to run Windows for random work or internet browsing-related computer use. To that end, however, it is necessary to find suitable replacements for all the software I use on Windows.

Programming
Matlab now fully supports Intel macs. So does Psychtoolbox. I can't say that I'm too familiar with XCode, but it seems more friendly to use than VisualStudio. Also, let's not forget all the very good free text editors that support code formatting and OS X's built in programming support with the developer tools installs. Cygwin seems like a joke by comparison.

Office Suite:
Keynote has been my presentation software of choice ever since I couldn't get movies to embed properly in powerpoint. Word is nice, but office 2007 has changed the location of too many things for me to feel used to it. At that point, I might as well use one of those nice text editors mentioned above, Pages, or textedit. Plus, with my newfound LaTeX skills, dealing with Word's horrible formatting issues is a thing of the past. As far as numerical computations, it looks like Numbers can suffice for the simpler things, while I can rely on Matlab for more extensive crunching and producing consistent-quality graphs. And there's always grapher.

Internet Tools:
It appears that with Leopard, terminal is now chock full of great modern features. Terminal's native interface also makes it superior to puTTY as a telnet/SSH tool. As far as fugu/Transmit/YummyFTP/WinSCP, it's more or less a wash. I don't expect much from an ftp tool, and both the Mac and Windows variants work fine for my taste. Browser-wise, Safari is still not as widely supported as firefox or IE. Luckily firefox on OS X works excellently, as well as the more native-looking Camino. Still, Safari has a certain amount of integration that just works more nicely in OS X for me than any other browser. I had always had problems with Mail, but with my recent transition to Gmail, I expect most of those problems to go away. Now, I should be able to grab all my mail from a single Gmail IMAP account. Much much nicer than trying to manage smtp permissions. Finally, as far as instant messaging is concerned, all hail Adium!

Operating System:
Spotlight seems to be vastly improved in OS X as far as speed is concerned. This makes quicksilver less important. However, nothing similar is available on Windows. Google Desktop probably comes the closest, but it does not have the extensive access to metadata that is supported by the OS that is available in OS X. A lot of user interface items are just better done in OS X (esp. Leopard) than in Windows. Even with issues with the new dock and semi-translucent menu bar, launching applications is still much better in OS X than trying to use the quick launch bar, desktop icons, or start menu in windows. Finally, it appears as though Time Machine provides a painless, easy-to-use back-up system to all users. It is literally as plugging in a second hard drive, clicking a dialog, and it's all set up. Moreover, the implementation is clever indeed, allowing power-users access to backup files directly through a directory structure. While both Leopard and Vista failed to deliver on promises of a new filesystem, they do seem to be in the works. As it stands, however, Leopard's fs has the more modern features and uses them to great advantage. Moreover, it's highly likely that Apple users will be able to switch to zfs (or whatever Apple plans to use) in the near future (10.6?), much sooner than whatever lurks after Vista. I am highly doubtful that Microsoft will roll in a filesystem switch with sp1 or sp2 for Vista...

Miscellaneous:
Other areas where Apple is just better:

• device integration (e.g. syncing phones)
• system-wide spelling (and in Leopard, grammar also!) check
• foreign language support and fast-switching
• not taking forever to renew ip addresses through dhcp (supposedly Leopard has also fixed a number of networking hangups that have persisted for a while)