Ntuple Indemnity

So I just punched my blog into Typealyzer, a text-analysis tool that classifies its input in accordance with the 16 psychometric pigeonholes of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Holy crap is it good:

The analysis indicates that the author of http://www.nicholastam.ca is of the type:

INTJ – The Scientists

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it – often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be pshysically hesitant to try new things. [Is that psychically or physically, or both? — ed.]

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communcating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples. Since they are extremly good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Typealyzer is still in beta, but you can try it out on your favourite online publications. Keep in mind that it is an analysis of the text, not the person—or to look at it another way, an inferred reading of the writer’s persona through the text. For bonus points, try it on group blogs.

I wish the wacky minds behind it would disclose more about their algorithms beyond the layman’s summary in the FAQ. I’d like to know how much tuning they did, if any, to categorize the texts that they used as a statistical corpus. I’m also curious about what specific factors, if any, they tried to model and weight; syntactic structure is a no-brainer, but I wonder if they considered the use of personal pronouns, sentence/word lengths (akin to the Flesch-Kincaid formula but deployed to different ends), abstractness of vocabulary, or any number of other factors that are often revealing of style—especially when you consider the metrics displayed on the brain-activity map the program outputs along with the Myers-Briggs type.

I think it would be conceptually impossible to produce an absolute, generative parametrization of style (for reasons I won’t get into here), but a statistical analysis like this one—and the strength of its correlation to our intuitive estimations—could go a long way towards a better formal understanding of that elusive quality we call “writer’s voice”. My computational linguistics nerves are all atingle.

This week’s selection: Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (1997) by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

In brief: What begins as a comprehensive study of poetic translation evolves into a treatment of human empathy and intercultural understanding, a refutation of John Searle’s Chinese Room argument against artificial intelligence, and a solemn remembrance of the author’s deceased wife. With its exclusive focus on language, Le Ton beau is a substantially less technical and more streamlined tome beau than Gödel, Escher, Bach; the mathematically averse may find it a more accessible point of entry to Hofstadter’s thought, as there is no talk of recursion or formal incompleteness in sight. Those who prefer their poetry devoid of metre and rhyme will take issue with Hofstadter’s conservative aesthetics; those who prize pattern, structure, and wordplay will rejoice.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Le Ton beau de Marot, keep reading below.)

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Tomorrow, Google is launching Google Chrome, their WebKit-based open-source browser. Interesting, but not as interesting as how they announced it: a 38-page comic book by Scott McCloud, which explains what Chrome does and how it works. It’s a good read for anyone who wants an insight into web browser architecture, even if you only have a basic comprehension of software design.

For those of you who don’t know, Scott McCloud is the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which is, alongside Will Eisner’s more instructionally oriented Comics and Sequential Art, the canonical primer to comic-book semiotics. So he brings his whole arsenal of frame-breaking layout tricks to the table, and the whole endeavour embodies a kind of documentarian character; you get the sense that Google is a magic workshop where the products are so omnipresent by design that that the elves have to tinker from the inside out.

More to the point, it’s educational. I learned a lot about browsers today.

My question: can McCloud do this for every major Google project? Pretty please?

This week’s selection: The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006) by Marvin Minsky.

In brief: In The Emotion Machine, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky presents his theories on the “big-picture” questions pertaining to the human mind—emotions, consciousness, common sense—in plain English and easy-to-follow diagrams, but one wonders if he goes too far in distilling his ideas for a layman’s audience, at the cost of the specificity and rigour that readers from a more technical background may demand. Minsky’s most insightful philosophical premises appear as corollaries and implications, and beg for further development. Nevertheless, the book fulfills its purpose as an expressly non-technical overview of how one might develop models for decomposing higher-order thought into manageable representations.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Emotion Machine, keep reading below.)

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As it is, I’m already very indecisive when it comes to shopping for books. But if you really want to trap me at a display case for nigh on an hour, toss in an NP-hard combinatorial problem (my non-mathematical readers: refer to this simple illustration) and I’m done for.

The scenario: I won a $250 book prize for an essay I wrote last year (something to do with moral culpability in Adam Bede, if I remember correctly), redeemable for anything published by the University of Alberta Press. Because I insist on getting my money’s worth, we can formulate this as Objective 1: Spend $250 on books.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. You see, when I went to go pay the UAP a visit and make my book selection, I travelled by bicycle, which inadvertently introduced a second dimension, making this a doubly-constrained knapsack problem. Objective 2: Select books of appropriate size and weight that will fit in my backpack without getting wrecked, so I can actually carry them home on a bike.

Of course, I wasn’t just going to pick any set of books I see just so I could use up the entirety of the book prize without having to pay extra for going over. Objective 3: Maximize the sum of the value-functions assigned to the contents of the books selected. (In plain English: “Pick interesting books that I will actually read.”)

My solution?

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