Apple's Stupid Data Detector: Meetings

Built into OS X is the great capability for detecting when a meeting is being mentioned in things like email messages. I'm calling this by the old System name of "Data Detector", though I suspect that might not be what Apple calls it now.

It's pretty impressive on the whole. Given a bit of text like the one in a message I got this morning...

The meeting will be on Friday, April 26th at 9:30am in BC 106.

on hover it highlights the date and time bit and give me a little pop-down menu to make an appointment in iCal out of these data:

I can edit the appointment before it gets created, putting it in the right calendar, for example. Great, right? Yes, great.

But...

It also does a few stupid things. First it uses the subject of the message as the appointment text, which would be fine, except the subject very clearly has the same date and time info and it doesn't bother to try to strip that out, even as it removes the leading "Fwd: " from that same text. Second it's apparently too stupid to ever recognize any location info, even when that info is pretty clearly indicated by adjacent and obviously locational prepositional phrases like "in..." or "at...". Sometimes it's going to get those wrong, but a lot of the time it won't, yet it clearly hasn't been written to scrape that info out of a message. Finally this capability isn't active in text that you're typing. So if I'm in Mail, writing a message to confirm an appointment with someone, I can't just click on my own date and time text and make an appointment out of that. I have to go into iCal and do it.

This is one of those insanely great things I love in OS X. It's frustrating when it's senselessly crippled.

Back to 3D

I did a little experimenting with some 3D after Christmas 2010 when my son (not me, I swear) got an XBox with Kinect. Fun, but labor-intensive, as the tools were still fairly unpolished, especially for the non-programmer. (Search for posts with the Kinect label.) Then a month or two ago, I started getting into it again, thinking about how I could use it on the dig, and including some research into various other kinds of photography. I was looking at the freeware stuff (like VisualSFM), which now looks pretty good, but still wasn't quite working on my MacBook. Then I got into using Homebrew instead of MacPorts, and one thing led to another and I got busy with other stuff (like my actual day job).

Then a few weeks ago, my friend and colleague Sebastian Heath started tweeting a bit about stuff he was doing in 3D, using the inexpensive (but not free) AgiSoft PhotoScan. Looked pretty good, and he poked me a bit about not writing up what I was doing, so here I am.

Well, almost here. I bought the software today and spent a little time with it and my iPhone. My first test model was a head of Michelangelo's David, which graces a column in my living room, but that turned out to be a bit shiny, so I moved on to another iconic figure who makes an annual appearance in the house. I snapped 14 photos of him, not quite going all the way around. Then I tested it out in PhotoScan using the speedy low-res settings and since that looked good, I cranked it up to 11 to come up with a fairly nice model, especially given how lazy I was about it. A still image is to the right. Click to enlarge. You can mostly read the numbers of the various pockets (though that's a 6, not a 5 right in the front) and the detail isn't bad. The whole thing took a little over an hour to render and then I moved it into MeshLab, smoothed it out, and exported.

As I said, more soon. I'm hoping to have some fun over Christmas break on our visit to the in-laws.

Election 2012: What if the House were bigger?

As usual after a presidential election, there have been a lot of maps showing how the vote went in the US electoral college. One thing that I haven't seen get much discussion is the effect of limiting the size of the college itself.

Thanks to Nate Silver, lots of people now know the number of votes in the US electoral college (whether they realize it or not): 538. With the exception of the three given to Washington, DC, the electors are distributed to each state according to the number of congressmen it has. (DC's total is equal to the number it would have were it a state, not to exceed the number held by the least populous state.) This formula sets a minimum of three electors for each state, equal to its two senators and one House representative. Currently the seven least populous states have three electors. This minimum perpetuates the equality of states' voting power in the senate, where population is irrelevant and every state gets two votes. It's also the case that every state must have at least one representative, no matter how few citizens it has. In other words, the smallest states have more voting power than their populations would warrant otherwise. (There's also an inherent inequality in that there needs to be a whole number of electors, which means there will be other inequalities due to rounding.)

So what would happen if the House were bigger and there were therefore more electors and also a more proportionate relationship between a state's population and the number of its electors? In effect this would give more influence to the more populous states.

To check this out, I made a little spreadsheet to recreate the distribution of electors. The tricky part is assigning members to the House of Representatives. This assignment isn't quite straightforward (here's a nice little paper on alternatives to the current method), and my reconstruction spreadsheet of the current situation (435 members total) doesn't quite get it right (MN and RI are missing one member each), so my projection of what the House would look with more members is likely a tiny bit off too. (I could spend some more time on this, but I think I'm close enough and a little internet searching hasn't helped me out. Suggestions welcome in the comments.)

So what happens? In this election, Obama with 50.5% of the national vote got 332 electoral votes to Romney's 48% and 206. Had the House 485 members (an average of one more per state), Obama would have gotten 364 and Romney 224. Throw in another 50 and Obama's at 396 and Romney 243 (you'll note that my model is one over the real total of 638). In all cases, Obama wins a rounded-off 62% of the electoral college, so no change in that metric.

That doesn't mean that there would no changes at all in the way the election might go. For example, it might be possible to put together a different collection of states to win, or to neglect more of the smaller states and still win. It does however look like the picture wouldn't change much even with a much bigger House.

(It would be interesting to consider what would happen to the split between the parties in a bigger House, but given all the complications with drawing districts, that's far from straightforward to work out.)

Post-Sandy Update

It's not really post-Sandy for a lot of people. There are still hundreds of thousands without power and many - including a bunch of people I know at Breezy Point and a bigger bunch that I don't, but see every summer - are in worse shape than that. Still we've got power back and things are close enough to normal that I thought I'd revisit what I wrote the day before the storm hit.

1. The Model - Wow, the model nailed it. About the only thing it got wrong was the speed of the storm, which moved faster than expected...fortunately. Instead of having a landfall early Tuesday morning, it landed late Monday evening and by daylight on Tuesday was mostly gone.

2. The Rainfall - As predicted, rainfall was minimal around here. It didn't even hit the lower end of the range that had been predicted when I was writing. Instead we got a little more than an inch. My sump, which was dry before the rain came, was dry after too, and that was a good thing because we didn't have power from about 7:40 pm on Monday night. So a flooded basement was the one thing I didn't have to worry about. (And likewise I was wrong that we would get flooding without power.) As I wrote, this lack of rainfall was not something anyone was talking much about on TV, even though it meant one thing a lot of people did not have to worry about.

3. Outages - Al Roker was right. In the coastal areas that got hit hard with ocean surges, power seemed to be out uniformly, while elsewhere outages were spotty. Here in Maplewood, for example, the Village never lost power, while a few families are still out. We lost it for nearly eight days. I think I was right that damage in this immediate area was less than last year's Halloween storm, but there was so much damage along the coast and in heavily wooded areas, that the various utility companies couldn't repair it as quickly. That said, some of the damage around here was pretty spectacular, and a lot of trees went down, taking power lines with them.

4. Timing - The good forecasting and speedy action by public officials was indeed aided in great measure by the weekend. Lots of colleges and universities (like mine) were able to send kids home in plenty of time, and the various public-transportation systems had time to take action without worrying about a lot of people getting home from work. Individuals were also able to do a lot of shopping...a lot.

Once the full extent of the damage had become clear, there were a few lucky things too. The fairly low rainfall meant that those who hadn't been flooded didn't get water damage on top of the power loss. Also temperatures in the first days were moderate, with highs in the 50s, so people without heat could get by more easily. The major roads were fairly clear too, so on Tuesday and Wednesday it was possible to get around (or out of town) without too much trouble. Finally outages in a lot of areas were spotty. As I said above, Maplewood Village never lost power, and the public libraries were able to open up right away too. This meant that it was possible to escape a dark home to recharge one's literal or figural batteries. Cell service was a bit spotty, but good enough that most people I know had telephone and internet at least intermittently, which was good for keeping in touch.

At our house, we learned that our water heater doesn't need electricity, which was a nice surprise. That meant hot showers and clean dishes. Out gas stove kept working too, even if we had to light it by hand. No oven though, since that is controlled by the electronics in the control panel. We have a propane grill outside, which we didn't use, but could have. We also keep the house pretty cool in winter, so indoor temps in the high 50s were familiar.

Once it was clear that we didn't have to worry about flooding the basement, and that school and work were going to remain closed at least through the end of the week, we decided to make that visit to friends in upstate NY that we'd been putting off. Off we went, and discovered that just a little over two hours away, in an area that had been hit hard last year by the remnants of Irene, life was going on pretty much as normal. We caught up on the TV coverage of the disaster at home and counted our blessings. It seems like about half of our local friends performed some version of an escape.

This is two years in a row that we've lost power. Last year it was brief for us, but friends went without for several days. So I've got some plans to be better prepared. As I said, as long as our gas stays on, we have hot water and can cook indoors. Without gas, we'd be cooking outside. No electricity is a drag, but the appropriate candles along with the battery-powered small lights we have already (yay, LEDs!) can get us through the nights. For entertainment, we certainly missed more accessible internet, but cell service was good enough for keeping in touch and the radio was great (kudos to WNYC for terrific coverage of the storm and its aftermath). Our laptops could run all evening as long as we had charged them up during the day, but TV would have been nice (still finishing up The Wire on NetFlix).

The really big barrier to staying comfortably in the house was heat. Our furnace uses gas to create steam, so it doesn't use a lot of electricity, but it is hard-wired into the house line, so it couldn't be run without some playing around. It doesn't use a lot of juice, so it could easily have been run off an inverter from the car (which is how I charged up my phone), had it been wired for that. So item #1 is a transfer switch, which will let us run the furnace off the car inverter...or a generator, which we ordered on the last day we had power and arrived on the last day we didn't. The generator runs on propane, which we now always have for our grill. It isn't big (2kW), but it's enough to run the furnace, our sump pump, the stove, and various appliances, at least one at a time. The Prius in the driveway means that we have a fairly large supply of electricity around the house, so in a pinch we don't need to fire up the generator. We get about 400 miles to the tank, so we haven't been bothered by the rationing still in effect in NJ (and due to end in a few days). I may get a battery backup for the sump pump too. Those can last a few days at best, but I'm more concerned about short-term outages, like Irene last year, when the sump pump was running virtually non-stop for a few hours as the storm front passed through our area. I'd rather not have to run out to fire up the generator in those conditions. A back-up water pump is another possible purchase. I'm looking at smallish transfer pumps which can run off the car inverter (ours maxes out at 100W) and can be moved around to handle whatever flooding we might get. If nothing else, it could also help reduce the load on the sump pump during those surges.

All in all, we were pretty lucky. Lots of people lost their homes, other property, even lives. We had to do some labor, but got to visit dear friends and watch the destruction from a safe distance on TV. One cold night in the house was a small penalty in comparison to what might have been.

Ramblings on Sandy

Public officials in my area (northern NJ) seem to be doing all the right things: evacuating low-lying areas, shutting down public transportation, sending out all kinds of warnings. For my part, I find myself driven to skepticism by the slightly creepy enthusiasm of the media weather people...as usual. In this instance, this was fueled by the way a rather hasty mention on the Weather Channel Saturday morning of the injection of some dry air from the southwest which resulted in a serious drop in rainfall south and east of the storm.

So a few thoughts, not all of which are cynical:

1. The Modeling - Everyone keeps talking about the uniqueness of this storm. It's a strange kind of hurricane now, and is likely to lose hurricane status soon. It's also supposed to take an unprecedented left-hand turn, from what I can tell. Here's a plot of historical hurricane paths for hurricanes that were very close to Sandy's position. You'll notice that none of them takes such a sudden change in direction. So how good are the models at handling this kind of thing? We'll find out tomorrow morning, when Sandy either turns or doesn't. I'm genuinely curious...and not only because I'm not interested in bailing out my basement tomorrow night. (For the record, right now the consensus puts landfall somewhere in southern NJ.)
2. Rainfall - Last year we got seriously dumped on my Irene, about 6" in less than a day in my neck of the woods. In addition we'd had a fairly wet lead-up, so the ground was already full of water. This year in contrast has been average or even a bit dry, and Sandy is forecast to leave a total of 4" of rain over several days, starting some time tonight. I'm sure the coastal and riverine areas are gong to be much worse, but we're likely not to have as much potential for in-house flooding as last year. (If the power goes, we're definitely going to get water, but right now my sump is totally dry.)
3. Some people on the air (e.g., Al Roker) are giving warnings for 7-10 days of power outages. Now I'm sure that it's very possible that some small isolated areas could experience such a long absence of power, but most of us are very likely not to. In part this is because of the response to all of the problems after last year's Snowtober event, which resulted from many, many fallen trees and limbs, and the subsequent difficulty of getting around in the aftermath. I'm sure the state hasn't solved all the problems of last year, when only the rare spot had outages even approaching a week, but it's likely taken care of some of them, so we should see fewer problems this year.
4. Finally this timing of this year's storm is a lot better than last year's pair (Irene and Snowtober), both of which hit on Friday/Saturday. This year we started getting warnings on Thursday, and so had the entire weekend—instead of a few workdays—to empty out the shelves at our local hardwares stores (and surely others were better behaved than we've been and prepared in advance).

Bottom line? While I won't be surprised if the models are right, and the coasts really get hit hard, and the power goes out for a while, I do think the overall situation may well be better than last year (either big storm), and our personal one won't be any worse. But we'll all know much more in just a day.

Meanwhile...gotta find those AA batteries for my alarm clock.

Update II: "'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited

The APA has just announced the results of the annual elections for 2012. So what kind of institutional representation do we find the members voted for (not that there was much choice in this dimension)?

Office              Institution     Description

President           UCincinnati     Big Public U.

Financial Tr.       UC, Davis       Big Public U.

VP Prof. Matters    UVa             Big Public U.

VP Pub & Research   UT              Big Public U.

Board of Directors  Ohio State      Big Public U.

Board of Directors  UPenn           Big Private U.

Nominating Comm     Princeton       Big Private U.

Nominating Comm     CUNY            Big Public U.

Education Comm      Phillips-Exeter Elite Prep School

Goodwin Award Comm  Bowdoin         Elite Private LAC

Prof Matters Comm   Episcopal Acad  Elite Prep School

Program Committee   Harvard         Big Private U.

Pub & Research Comm Cornell         Big Private U.

So that's 6 from big public universities, 5 from big private universities, 2 from elite prep schools (1 of which has an endowment that easily dwarfs that of all but the wealthiest of LACs in this country) and 1 from an elite small LAC.

Classics' main professional organization continues to be dominated by the "haves."

Reminds me of the Romney campaign...

Previous posts in this category:

• Update: "'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited
• "'Crisis' in Classics" briefly revisited

My New article

I've been getting more and more involved in digital humanities, so I'm happy to announce that my most recent publication is now out in an open-access journal:

John D Muccigrosso, “Re‐Interpreting the Robinson Skyphos,” Studia Humaniora Tartuensia 13, no. A.1 (2012): 1–15

That's the old-school citation for this new-school journal, and hardly befitting a 21st-century open-access publication, so here are a couple of better choices:

1. The direct link to the journal webpage for the article
2. My Zotero library reference
3. The article itself as a pdf

The article is of course free to download (hence the OA bit), so knock yourself out. Please.

Here's the abstract:

The scene on the Robinson skyphos was wrongly identified for years as a depiction of clay‐working, either in a kiln or other preparation area. Recent scholarship has correctly identified it instead as one related to the grain harvest. This article presents a new examination of the scene, pointing out details the importance of which had not previously been noted. It also brings to bear comparanda from Egyptian art which put the identification of the scene beyond doubt.

The article began as part of an exploration of depictions of what were called potters and pottery workshops on ancient Greek pots, but which I thought were often not. It's inspired to a large extent by the work of David Gill and Michael Vickers on the elevation of ancient pottery-making to an "art" instead of a "craft" to reflect modern rather than ancient thinking. (And let's not get into the whole issue of how we distinguish between those two things!) The work actually started as an grad-school exploration of how much Greek pottery was exported, not only in terms of the number of physical pots, but also the economic value of those pots. It won't be surprising to learn that the course was taught by William Loomis, the guy who studied how much the ancient Greeks actually got paid (Wages, welfare costs, and inflation in classical Athens), and, upon reflection, the topic was probably a good indicator of my interest in what we now call digital humanities in the first place!

And for a little academic genealogy...David Moore Robinson, the classical art historian and collector after whom the pot in the article was named, was the teacher of George Hanfmann, who in turn taught John G. Pedley, with whom I studied at Michigan (though he was not my advisor) and who invited me to join the on-going excavations at Paestum, Italy at the end of the last century(!), which were conducted by Jim Higginbotham of Bowdoin College, with whom my previous article was co-authored. So far, so good. Fairly normal academic stuff, especially for a fairly small field like mine. But wait, there's more!

One of the standard works on the manufacturing techniques of ancient Greek pottery was written by Joseph V. Noble, who died in 2007, during the period in which I was working on this article. Turns out he had lived for years in the same town as me (Maplewood, NJ), just a few hundred meters from the train station where I daily stood for my commute, though unfortunately I never knew that until it was too late.