Behrooz Parhami Home & Contact Behrooz Parhami's Blog & Books Page This page was created in March 2009 as an outgrowth of the section entitled Curriculum Vitae "Books Read or Heard" in Professor Parhami's personal page. The rapid Research expansion of the list of books warranted devoting a separate page to it. Because the book entries constituted a form of personal blog, it was decided to Computer arithmetic title this page "Blog & Books," to also allow discussion of interesting topics Parallel processing unrelated to books from time to time. Fault tolerance Entries appear in reverse chronological order in each of the following sections. Broader research Blog entries for 2011 Research history Blog entries for 2010 List of publications Blog entries for 2009, April to December Books Read or Heard Until March 2009 Teaching ECE1 Freshman sem Blog Entries for 2011 2011/12/31 (Sat.): Happy new year to everyone! May the year 2012 bring you more of everything that you ECE154 Comp arch desire: love, joy, health, and prosperity. Here are four year-end items of potential interest. ECE252B Comp arith (1) Best books of 2011: Publishers Weekly has chosen the top 10 books of the year for you. (2) Viral videos of 2011: Time Video has picked the top 10 viral videos of the past year for you. ECE252C Adv dig des (3) Popular songs of 2011: Here are the top 10 songs of the year according to Billboard.com. LMFAO and ECE254B Par proc Adele each have two songs on the list. ECE257A Fault toler (4) Movies of 2011: MTV News has picked the top 10 movies of the year for you. Here is a second opinion from The Seattle Times. Student supervision Math + Fun! 2011/12/30 (Fri.): Here are four items of potential interest. (1) Quote of the day: "Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a Textbooks better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific." Bertrand Russell (2) Time for a new calendar? According to a CNN report, Richard Conn Henry and Steve Hanke of Johns Computer arithmetic Hopkins University have developed a new calendar where every date always falls on the same day of the week. Parallel processing They also propose doing away with time zones and adopting a universal time around the world to streamline Dependable comp international business. Every third month on the new calendar would have 31 days, with the rest of the months having 30, for a total of 364 days. They would replace existing 366-day leap years with an extra week at the Comp architecture end of December every five or six years Other books (3) The Iranian regime's cinema problem: Something very interesting is going on in Iranian cinema these days. Iranian films are gaining even more recognition than before at international film festivals and its directors and Service actors/actresses are being invited to these festivals as judges and honored guests. This turn of events does not sit well with the Islamic regime, which sees it as a Zionist conspiracy. Accordingly, the regime has unleashed Professional activities its attack dogs to badmouth directors, actors, and particularly actresses. Academic service (4) On the closure of the Strait of Hormuz: In a blog post on Iranian.com, Ari Siletz introduces a paper, Community service written by an MIT PhD candidate in 2008, now an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. In the paper (the post provides a link to the full text), Caitlin Talmadge analyzes the consequences Industrial consulting the closing the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, estimating that its reopening may take anywhere from 37-112 days (roughly 1-4 months), depending on a number of assumptions about unknown parameters. One conclusion from Files & Documents the emergence of this paper is that the West has rigorously analyzed the possibility of such a closure and is Useful Links likely quite ready for the various scenarios. Personal 2011/12/29 (Thu.): Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, translated from the French original, Picador, 1998. Blog & books This book (which I learned about through an e-mail message sent to me by someone I do not know, who http://ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/pers_blog.htm[1/4/2012 7:53:22 PM] Behrooz Parhami Favorite quotations thought I might find it interesting, given my book reviews and other writings) resonated with me, for reasons that I will outline first, before writing about the book itself. Poetry In science and engineering fields, the current Holy Grail is "interdisciplinary research," which draws upon Pet peeve knowledge and methods from two or more disciplines to create useful new ideas, understandings, processes, or products. Examples of interdisciplinary fields that have led to exciting new results include biomedical Virtual retirement engineering, computational linguistics, and human-machine interaction. There is, however, a serious danger in CE Program any interdisciplinary field: that of abuse and deceit. It is very rare nowadays for anyone to be highly skilled and knowledgeable in two or more different disciplines. So, interdisciplinary researchers typically are people from ECE Department one discipline who have picked up some information from the other discipline(s) through informal studies. For example, an engineer might pore over the biomedical literature, or pick the brains of biomed specialists, in order UCSB Engineering to understand problems in the latter field and then work on engineering solutions to those problems. Here UC Santa Barbara comes the rub: it is very easy to impress medical people with engineering concepts and jargon, and vice versa, so one sees many half-baked ideas presented in the scientific/technical forums of these fields in which shallow knowledge in one or another field is imminently visible. So-called hot or trendy fields are particularly prone to abuse and deceit, given financial and status motives. Fortunately, within the fields of science and engineering, there is a built-in safeguard against impostors lurking in the shadows between disciplines, while trying to impress specialists from each area with concepts and jargon from the other areas, without contributing anything useful. Scientific ideas are subject to experimental verification by other scientist, and processes or products can be simulated, prototyped, and assessed via testing and performance evaluation. So, charlatans do not last long in these fields, although by the time they are exposed, they may have achieved their immediate goals, be they academic promotion, award of large research grants, or fame. The same cannot be said about disciplines in humanities and the social sciences, which are the focus of the book under review. The authors thus set out "to draw attention to a relatively little-known aspect [of postmodernism in such fields], namely the repeated abuse of concepts and terminology coming from mathematics and physics ... exploiting the prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their own discourse a veneer of rigor" [pp. 4-5]. The book has an interesting genesis. In the mid-1990s, the book's first author wrote a parody "paper," entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in which nonsensical ideas and connection were discussed, with ample citations to real sources, including the works of authors he wanted to criticize (the paper had 200+ references). He submitted the paper to the Duke University Press journal Social Text, which accepted and published the work in its spring/summer 1996 issue (pp. 217- 252). This kind of parody has appeared in other disciplines as well (including a computer-generated paper in computer science), but the usual motivation in these other cases is to expose weak refereeing systems, incompetent referees, and journals' profit motives in publishing as many papers as possible. Sokal's parody paper is reproduced as Appendix A of the book under review, with extensive footnotes added to explain some of the "funny" parts. Appendix B provides additional comments on the parody, while Appendix C contains a follow- up paper, which contains an explanation of the parody and the author's motives in publishing it. This paper appeared in the journal Dissent (Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 93-99, Fall 1996), after being rejected by Social Text "on the grounds that it did not meet their intellectual standards" [p. 268]. So, the book under review expands on Sokal's parody-paper experiment by citing many other authors from different disciplines and commenting on the parts of their published bodies of work that can be viewed as abusing science. The authors focus on certain intellectual aspects of postmodernism that have had an impact on humanities and the social sciences. These aspects are characterized with a fascination with obscure discourses and an emphasis on discourse and language, as opposed to the facts referenced by the discourses [pp. 182- 183]. "What we are criticizing is the pretension of some celebrated intellectuals to offer profound thoughts on complicated subjects that they understand, at best, at the level of popularizations" [p. 6]. It comes as no surprise that this book has been attacked from many sides. The authors defend their work against some such critics in the preface to this English edition: "According to Robert Maggiori in Liberation, we are humorless scientific pedants who correct grammatical errors in love letters" [p. ix]. In what follows, I provide four examples of the abuses that resonated with me and which I could understand, given my knowledge of mathematics and physics at the level of a nonspecialist. 1. This is an example of abuse of mathematics by Julia Kristeva, who appeals to set theory to explain political philosophy: "If each individual or each social organism represents a set, the set of all sets that the State should be does not exist.