Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: October 2020

  • Oh that Halloween vibe

    To be understood. A certain power exists in being understood. 

    Dear Reader, 

    For the last few days I have taken my eye off the ball. In terms of writing and documenting the world around me my efforts have faltered. That in and of itself could be overcome, but in this case it was not even remotely handled well. It was a gap between thoughts that lasted much longer than it should have. A little over a month ago I subscribed to YouTube TV during a Monday night Kansas City Chiefs game. That decision brought a lot of news watching into my daily routine. I’m not sure that was productive or useful. Being in the moment right now and having a handle on everything that is going on is different than what the news presents. They are talking to people without a full understanding of what the respondent knows or believes. This requires them to reduce the framework for communication down to very simplistic platitudes and tropes. My tolerance for that type of communication is limited. Keeping current on the breaking news of the moment does not really provide you with anything particularly meaningful. That is the key element to consider in thinking about the difference between really understanding something and being aware of the latest version of it. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • Watching some baseball

    These are the times beyond reason. 

    Dear Reader, 

    It is that time of year again where the prospect of watching Star Trek: Discovery compels me to pay for the CBS All Access streaming pass. It is an effective way for them to get me to commit financially to watching. They just have to keep making more episodes. It is really hard to keep up with all the streaming content being created. Tonight I’m watching game 4 of the World Series on Fox. Returning to watching live sports has been exciting. Within this time of pandemic and a steady diet of staying in the house it is nice to be able to watch some baseball. This game so far is off to a decent start. During two of the games so far things have gotten a little out of hand and the level of competition was not even. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • Thinking about communication

    The art of writing letters has been lost. 

    Dear Reader, 

    People seem to have forgotten how to debate in general communication. It seems that all conversation is directional in nature vs. providing some solid type of given and take. People are often directing others or trying to move the trajectory of an argument by pushing the very end of the argument as a slogan or aphorism. This type of directional effort falls short of convincing people of anything due to the hollow nature of it without the supporting foundation. That is one of the reasons that the media has been breaking down as an institution. Ongoing narratives have broken down and the foundation and background of an argument no longer fit into a sound byte or the space between commercial breaks allows communication to suffer and the people to be less informed. 

    Maybe in some ways it feels like every conversation is for all the marbles and the national dialogue is the local dialogue. This obviously is problematic for a number of reasons. I started to think about how the art of writing letters has been lost. Imagine somebody sitting down and having to put everything together in one submission of thought to another person. Each of them having as much time as necessary to complete the communication cycle. In this case of a letter writing cycle the communication method was not as instant as an email, text, audio, or video. Even if people did sit down to write comprehensive missives would that format of communication be consumable is a question that remains. Maybe both the generation and consumption of arguments had changed. It does seem that with the rise of podcasts people are seeking out longer form communication. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • Thinking about methodology

    We stand at the door of so many possibilities.

    Dear Reader, 

    Today we are going to dig into the nature of survey driven research. I’m interested in learning about the respondent from a 360 degree perspective. A survey is designed to extract information from the respondent. That information being extracted should be useful and definitive in some way that could not have been otherwise derived by observation. That last assertion could be debated. It could be evaluated from a lot of different perspectives. I’m wondering just how much of the research being conducted utilizing survey methods takes into account how the respondent feels about being a participant in the study. All of the recent talk about political tracking polls has probably raised my interest in the aforementioned research methodology question. A lot of different lines of inquiry could be raised to really dig into this question about respondents within survey based research methodologies. Generally speaking I have not participated in a survey in some time. I cannot to the best of my knowledge remember completely a survey outside of maybe a few clicks online here and there. 

    At the moment, I have taken to wondering about who has the best deep fried appetizers in the area. By who I mean to say what restaurant. It seems that during this great year of pandemic the delivery services that bring food from restaurant to customer are growing. That business model appears to be working out well enough for those services. The cost of the delivery may very well be wreaking havoc for the restaurants. This is not an example of pure arbitrage, but instead it is an example of a service existing on the basis of another service. I’m sure an economic term exists to explain the dependence of the backward linkages between the delivery service and the origins restaurant. At the moment, I cannot remember that term so you will have to just imagine that one exists and it is pithy, resplendent, and otherwise eloquent. Getting back to the topic at hand, I should be able to pretty easily figure out based on the places I have been where I might want to do business again. That would be the easiest way to answer the question. It would be true empirically based on a direct sample and my preferences and the quality of the restaurant at the time of dining, delivery, or pickup. Answering the question in a more complete way would require a much larger sample size than my own personal experience. It would be possible to look at the ratings of some aggregation websites or even sort and filter within some of the aforementioned delivery services. Those methods might be the right way to go or it might be simpler to make a choice about dinner and then return to the search at a later time.

    Several quick searches by rating as the only factor quickly put me right back where my initial decision would have taken me anyway. I could have and perhaps should have just gone with my initial reaction and avoided a bunch of additional research. Keeping my mind focused on a solid research agenda seems to be harder and harder over time. Honestly, it is much easier to just not do anything than to actively tackle hard questions each day. During this year of pandemic a lot of time has been spent in the pursuit of just waiting for better news. That alone was enough to push forward my academic research agenda. Right now conference requests are starting to come in and journal deadlines are the same as they have always been. Every day is a good day to sit down and write a paper, but that is easier to say than to accomplish. A cup of afternoon coffee just got brewed and I’m writing along here while watching the Green Bay Packers play football against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • A few thoughts…

    Some days are just a little different than others. Yesterday I really thought deeply about the prospect of just taking down my weblog. It has been years since that happened. The last time was years ago when the domain was moved from the .net back to the primary .com domain. At one point, I head both of those domains up and running for reasons that now seem unnecessary. All of that was related to my thoughts on the lost art of communication by writing letters. This weblog for the most part is a series of poorly written and edited letters in the form of functional observations. I had started to really think about what it would mean to approach this effort in terms of writing open letters. That would involve a different type and style of writing on a daily basis.

  • Reading a journal double issue

    A pretty big double journal issue from the American Review of Public Administration (ARPA) showed up in the mailbox this week. It contains 808 pages of journal articles about Covid-19 from a public administration perspective. I’m going to spend the weekend reading this double issue and thinking about why each of these articles was written. I’m going to deconstruct them from the perspective of why they were put together and why each specific article was assembled. I’m really curious about why the author structured it and published it in the way it ended up on the page for readers.

  • Something more novel

    Earlier today I started to wonder about the prospects of moving things along this weekend. It seems this weekend will be a very busy adventure. This post today is going to be a little shorter than it should be for this time of night. My morning writing session was not very good at all for a variety of reasons. A lot of balls were up in the air. A lot of balls are still up in the air. 

  • Triggering a miracle year

    A lot of my time in the last couple of days has been spent trying to figure out what sets the stage for extreme productivity. Triggering a miracle year seems impossible. Facilitating the conditions for a miracle year seems reasonable. Either way the idea of having a creative outburst large enough to constitute a miracle year seems beyond chance, but the conditions around the occurrence have become keenly of interest to me. To that end I have been trying to figure out how to plant the right seeds and what conditions they would need to help set up a miracle year. Earlier this week I even considered if getting into a miracle year mode of work would require a return to shark mode or some type of hyperactive constant working. My main guess is that some combination of deep thinking and situational awareness is required. The right spark at the right time for it has to be a key part in making it work. You have to look right at the edge of what is possible and communicate beyond it. Something has to give to translate what is next broadly and completely. Just grabbing a glimpse beyond the edge of what is possible would only be speculative. Firmly taking that step beyond the edge of what is possible is what pushes things forward beyond the here and now.

  • Intellectual flooding (papers)

    On a Monday of all days, I started to dig in and focus my academic ambitions to a very specific line of inquiry related to really flushing out the trajectories in a myriad of machine learning literature reviews. I’m walking down the path to understanding a review of reviews of sorts. That inquiry is not very targeted and the content I’m going to encounter will be more of a breath based search of machine learning knowledge. After working through that tower of academic contribution I plan to spend some type really digging into the depth of a couple of key items to form a new academic trajectory toward some survey work or coding efforts that would yield additional academic contributions on my part. 

    At this point in time, I need to refocus my efforts and spend time really digging into the current stream of academic contributions. That will help me rebalance my efforts to be a mix of both productive research projects and steady inquiry into how the broader academic of academic thought is changing. Given the sheer volume of publications that are occurring right now that becomes even more challenging. That is why I elected to focus on only reading literature reviews to start. I felt that a review of reviews would help me target the core articles being referenced commonly within the reviews and help me look at what outliers the various academics found to be important. 

    Today I’m going to spend more time reading those papers that were identified yesterday. It was very overly ambitious to think that I could read and digest 2-3 literature reviews per day. That is an expectation from back when all I had to do in a given day was academic efforts. Within the limited windows of a full day of adulting the ability to consume 30 pages of a journal article simply takes more time. That is the nature of things I guess as we move forward into this study of machine learning. I’m going to move along at the best speed possible and focus on making quality contributions to the academy of academic thoughts. At this point in time, trying to just spew out content is a fool’s errand to deliver errata destined for a historically dusty shelf at the academy.

  • Always finishing things

    Coming up with ideas and thinking about the future is a lot easier than always finishing things. Mountains of ideas are hard to keep up with and the time commitment to close out something that only took an instant to create can be extreme to finish. Right now I can sketch out the chapters of a book on applied machine learning on a sheet of paper. Actually taking the time to write that book would be a large multiple month commitment of my time. So many people are probably writing that book that it does not seem like a reasonable use of my time at the moment, but it is an example of where a few minutes of work would translate to months of effort to close that effort out. That is why always finishing things is harder than it sounds. You will quickly find your list of potential things to do quickly faces a situation with over-supplied ideas and undersupplied time. That is one of those things that is always the hallmark of having to make choices about our time. We stare out at the perfect possible future and know that only so much can be done in one lifetime. Inherently that is what makes contributions to the academy of academic thought so compelling. You get the chance to contribute to a body of work with intergenerational continuity. Permanence is an interesting thing to associate with an idea, but it is a rather powerful one. Great ideas are sold, stolen, and reused based on their merit. The best ones keep on moving along from thinker to thinker. 

    My time is always something that needs to be better accounted for. It is a scarce resource and applying my time to problems should be done based on some reasonable heuristic. Always finishing things is very time consuming. It is done without any filtering heuristic. Always doing anything is potentially problematic. You have to account for the situation and think about what is actually being done. For the next week or so I’m going to take stock of the things I’m spending my time doing by using some note cards to keep track of the larger blocks of things that are going to be consuming my time. Yesterday I had decided to spend a block of my time reading 2-3 peer reviewed machine learning literature reviews a day until that exercise was exhausted. I’m expecting that the literature review reading will show up on the note cards, but the times when it does not will be insightful as well. It will give me a look at what needed to happen and what happened instead based on how I’m committing my time.  

    Some time later… I went out to Google Scholar and started a search for, “machine learning literature review.” During the search autocomplete suggested that I might be interested in a search for, “machine learning literature survey.” Apparently, both searches are pretty common and I’ll keep that “survey” term in my back pocket for after I read a few literature reviews. After completing that first search the Google search algorithm had a few related searches to suggest that included: machine learning algorithms, pattern recognition machine learning, machine learning mitchell, supervised machine learning, machine learning classification, uci machine learning, machine learning intrusion, and machine learning repository. I can tell the web of ideas that will spill out from reading machine learning literature reviews is going to include a lot of spokes into very specific lines of inquiry. To try to stay as current as possible I applied a filter to only show me articles since 2020. I’ll have to use the more recent publications to work my way back to the more foundational scholarly work on the subject.

    The first 3 articles I encountered based on relevance to the search for articles since 2020 were as follows:

    1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11354v4 This one was free and easy to download. 
    2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305054820300435 This one cost $39.95 to read and was abandoned. 
    3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952197619302672 This one was free to download.