The Bible itself is an example of evolution

[I wish I could insert a picture of bibles evolving here - 'cause they do]

Andy Schlafy of Conservapedia has started the Conservative Bible Project.

This project suddenly reminded me of the time I was on the plaza at Colorado State where a man with a sandwich board around him and a bible in one hand was yelling to everyone that they were going to hell.  Another student came up with a bible and disagreed saying the bible did not say what he claimed and showed him how the passage he was quoting was incorrect.  But the man had memorized the passage correctly, he just had a different version of the bible.

How can you subscribe to biblical literalism when it is obvious that the bible has gone through thousands of years of revisions and edits?

Even Andy Schlafy admits that language “is never 100% precise”:

I have an open mind about this. There is a different between “original intent,” which is what we’ve suggested, and “textualism”, which seems to be what you want (or you may simply be criticizing this project for political reasons). I tend to think “original intent” is a better approach, but welcome other comments and suggestions.

He argues that the edits they are proposing for the Bible conform to the ‘original intent’.  The conversation underneath that statement repeats a question I have, “How is “original intent” determined?”.  Human interpretation.  It has never been any different.  How can you claim the bible is the literal word of god, yet still maintain that every word is imprecise and relies on the inferred intent of the reader?

Schlafy contends “The number one reason why most people are liberals is so that they can cling to a double standard.”  But it seems that he maintains a monster of a double standard himself.  Bravo Schlafy – you’re just a conservative.

Which model is a better prediction?

We have developed a scale for addiction to an MMORPG.  I am attempting to predict a resondent’s score on the scale based on a number of variables.  I tried an OLS multple-regression first and got a pretty decent fit (R-sq 0.19, p < 0.001), but I found the residuals to be a little too spread out.   I could definitely improve this, and I will before this goes to publication… but I wanted to experiment with something else as well.

Comparison of residuals between OLS and SOM models.

I have been interested in self-organized maps (SOM) for quite awhile and wanted to see if an SOM model would be any better at predicting addiction.  So I fit a 10×10 supervised back-propagating map to the data space.  The resulting prediction residuals were very different.  The residuals from the OLS were Gaussian while the SOM residuals were more Laplacian.

Here we have a classic academic dilemma between impressing and informing.  An SOM would be pretty impressive, but I think in the end I’m probably going to end up with the OLS.  My audience would understand the OLS results much easier.

I think this is yet another time when I want to try out an SOM but it just isn’t practical.  Always good to improve and expand some skills and experience though.

Electronic signatures are a bit scary

Electronic signatures are a bit scary since you can’t really view the ink and see how it’s denser in some places ratehr than others.  I always worried that it would be easy to forge my signatures on an electronic pad.

But having seen some new visualizations in a New Scientist article makes me think otherwise.  Maybe electronic pads are more secure than real ink?

The colorful diagrams below each of the signatures emphasizes both the speed of writing and pressure used.  The forgeries, while they look the same in the actual writing, have very different speed and pressure signatures.  It is very easy to distinguish real from fake.   Plus it looks damn cool.

So much glorious data!

This is sweet.  The bureau of labor statistics has maintained an ongoing longitudinal survey of “12,686 young men and women who were 14-22 years old when they were first surveyed in 1979.”

This is excellent since I’ve been meaning to practice some my longitudinal data analysis.  It’s a bummer that they recently started skipping years.  But I think that’s what modern longitudinal methods using mixed models can compensate for.

Why not 7 degrees of separation?

In a review of Christakis’ and Fowler’s new book, Connected, the reviewer asks a couple good questions:

“What is it about human society that gives it such an enduring structure? Why not seven degrees of separation, or four degrees of contagion?”

Christakis and Fowler gained fame from their incredible 2007 paper showing the movement of obesity through networks using the Framingham Heart Study data.  But I agree with the question.  They never really answer the questions of why behavior tends to only induce three degrees from the source.

I was somewhat satisfied by one explanation of “why 6 degrees” in a short paper by Jon Kleinberg.  In it he shows that networks have a level of maximum efficiency based on the amount of re-wiring of connections that are performed.  It is possible that the 6 degrees we see in society is an attractor of the dynamic re-wiring of our own social networks.  That is, if there were more chaos in our networks connections would not be as regular and the average path length from source to destination would increase, and if we were less chaos the network connections would be too regular and we’d have to shuffle much further to reach a social destination.  Thus it is likely that there is a feedback between average path length and the coefficient of re-wiring in social networks and a ~6 degree network is what emerges.

But I’m still curious about this 3 degrees of influence thing.

Vulpine Supervenience

Vulpine Supervenience is my new blog.  This two-word phrase does not turn up anywhere on the interwebs… until now.  And probably for good reason.  Who else would associate foxes with the philosophical notion that collective properties, such as consciousness and traffic waves, supervene on the lower level local action of interdependent components?

Well, I would.

My name is Jesse.  I am a researcher at a social science and evaluation firm in Denver, CO, USA, and I am completing my M.A. in sociology from Colorado State U.  I have an unquenchable thirst for science, statistics, data, economics, and social philosophy.  I also nurse a World of Warcraft obsession – so it’s good I’m getting some pubs out of it.   I live with my beautiful fiance Teresa and our dog and cat in our new house.  I like foxes, good beer, and I have been really digging Andrew Bird lately.

I restarted my blogging since I felt my old blog, Orbital Teapot, was slumped.  I used to harbor a strong interest in religion as a natural phenomena, but I have branched out a bit.  I hope this revives and refocuses my interests and broadens my connection to the larger community.  I found the most popular and most useful posts I wrote were ne’er longer than 300-500 words (about the length of a standard newspaper article).  So don’t expect anything long-winded (at least not often).  I love you.  Wipe your feet.  Have a seat.  Have an apple.  Yum.  And beware of fox musk.