Deresiewicz on "Scientism"

Deresiewicz laments the notion that "science is the only valid form of knowledge".

[editors] want numbers; studies, sociology. Aristotle, Montaigne, and Emerson are not valid authorities on the topic, say, of friendship, but a study of 50 college students is enough to convince an editor of anything.

There definitely is something that rings true in his argument.

However, I find the example of equating experience and data as equally valid means to arrive at the conclusion "city life is stressful" somewhat problematic.

For example, many people feel that violent crime has increased, while "scientific" data seem to show otherwise (see this TED talk by Steve Pinker on his book on the topic).

When experience and data diverge, data - trust the data!

Setting up the random number generator seed in Matlab and Octave

Mike Croucher as an interesting post on correctly and incorrectly setting up the seed in Matlab.

The key takeaway is that one should not use rand('seed',x) or rand('state',x) to reset the random number seed, since Matlab defaults to an inferior generator used in older versions. It is preferable to use rng(x) instead.

GNU Octave on the other hand has a less quirky take on the whole thing.

Using rand('seed',x) defaults to older generators, while rand('state',x) resets the seed, but still uses a version of Mersenne Twister.

How to: Crop PDF Images

If you use Matlab (or some other program) to make a plot and then export the figure to a PDF (for inclusion in a TeX document for example), you will end up with plenty of whitespace around the image as below.

It is easy to find out the "bounding box" using ghostscript as:

gs -sDEVICE=bbox -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH file.pdf

which after a bunch of messages yields something like:

%%BoundingBox: 89 231 491 545
%%HiResBoundingBox: 89.766138 231.192063 490.841915 544.769913

You can use those dimensions, and use the TeX command

\includegraphics[bb = 89 231 491 545 ]{file.pdf}

to trim the image within TeX.

Alternatively, you can also use ghostscript to crop the image itself by using:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \

   -o trimmedFile.pdf \

   -c "[/CropBox [89 231 491 545] /PAGES pdfmark" \

   -f file.pdf

where the output file trimmedFile.pdf is generated. You then don't have to worry about the bounding box inside the TeX document.

Another route is to use the perl script pdfcrop.

pdfcrop file.pdf

produces the appropriately cropped file file-crop.pdf

Cleve Moler: Matlab, textbooks and blog

As many of you who use Matlab might know, Cleve Moler was a professor of math and computer science at a bunch of universities (including Michigan), before he co-founded Mathworks.

I should have known this before, given how much Matlab and GNU Octave I use, but only recently did I find out about two free textbooks that he wrote. They are available (as pdfs - either chapterwise or in full) on the Mathworks website. The first called "Numerical Computing with MATLAB" is an engaging trek through the usual topics of numerical analysis with Matlab. It is written in an extremely accessible style, and highlights the many special insights he has accumulated over the years. The use of Matlab allows him to quickly explore some topics, do some quick computations, plot and visualize, and mine for knowledge and wisdom.

The other book called "Experiments with Matlab" is similar in spirit, except that it is targeted at younger audiences. Rather than using a standard numerical analysis course to lay down the skeleton of the book, it jumps from one puzzle to another, one curiosity to the next looking at the underlying patterns and math.

Both books are very highly recommended, regardless of whether you are a student learning this material for the first time, or an instructor who has taught similar topics several times. There is something in it for everybody.

I should also mention that Cleve writes an engaging blog called "Cleve's Corner" which I now have on my Google Reader.