Ken Dyck

According to The Globe and Mail, the U.S. has put Canada on a special watch list as part of its annual report on intellectual property rights. We share this honour with such illustrious nations as Ukraine, Belize, Latvia, Lithuania, Taiwan and Thailand.

“It is imperative that Canada improve its enforcement system so that it can stop the extensive trade in counterfeit and pirated products, as well as curb the amount of transshipped and transiting goods in Canada,” according to the report by the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

The report also urged Canada to pass legislation to give its customs officers greater power to seize suspected pirated and counterfeit goods.

Welcome to the Axis of Piracy, folks.

Luís Nunes Amaral at Northwestern University and his team have discovered one of the keys to building a successful team, according to a New Scientist story. After analysing the production teams responsible for Broadway musicals between 1877 and 1990, and scientific research teams from 1955 to 2004, they found that successful teams have mix of new and experienced collaborators:

The found they could predict success largely looking at just two parameters – the likelihood of a newcomer being in the team, and the likelihood of a collaboration being repeated. “We were very surprised because it worked. We were able to reproduce what was going on very nicely,” Amaral told New Scientist.

The researchers rated the success of scientific teams by examining the impact of the journals they published their work in, spanning ecology, astronomy, social psychology and economics.

“The teams publishing in good journals were built in a different way,” he says. Research teams publishing in lower impact journals tended to repeat collaborations again and again. The most successful teams did work with the same colleagues too, but only 75% of the time, he says.

One more reason it makes sense to hire co-op students.

When I worked at TI, we kept a small army of co-op students on staff every term. At one point, nearly half the engineering staff was students. Besides being cheap labour, they always brought a lot of fresh ideas with them. It made for a very energetic and fun workplace. I wondered at the time if it made the team more productive. I suspected it did, but it’s nice to see some research to back it up.

It seems a national election is on the horizon for us Canadians. As usual, I’m at a loss for whom to cast my vote. The Liberals are making promises they can’t keep to buy my vote; the NDP wants to increase my taxes so they can spend more on a plethora of government services I’ll never use; and the Conservatives are wasting my time and tax dollars by calling an election, simply because it looks like they might have a chance of winning.

The more attention I pay to Canadian nation politics, the more inclined I am toward voting for Zaphod. Thanks, David.

EETimes is reporting that the first product from TSMC’s 65nm process is going to be a low-power “platform or technology”.

I find it interesting that low-power is rising in importance with chip designers these days. On the downside, it could be a sign of more competition for AMI Semiconductor, my employer. On the up, it could also indicate that the market in which we have established ourselves is about to grow.

Anyways, I wonder what the application is, and who TSMC is making it for.

Larry worries that our country is being overrun by worthless altruistic looters, the likes of which inhabited Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged, which glorifies self-interest and portrays altruism as the one of the most self-destructive ideas known to man. His mention of the novel reminded me of a recent New Scientist article, entitled Charity begins at Homo sapiens that I’ve been meaning to blog about.

The article summarizes some current research into strong reciprocity, a phenomenon where people help others to their own detriment, from an evolutionary perspective. Some of the findings may be startling to Randians:

Further support for the idea that strong reciprocity is an adaptation in its own right comes from the theoretical studies of economist Herbert Gintis of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, anthropologist Robert Boyd of the University of California at Los Angeles, and others. They set up a computer model in which groups of individuals interacted, and watched how their behaviour evolved. Individuals were set up in the model to behave initially either as cheats or as cooperators, and in personal interactions the former came off best. When groups competed with one another, however, cooperation came into its own: groups with more cooperators were likely to flourish.

But that was only the start. The individuals, whether initially cooperators or cheats, were also programmed to copy successful behaviour. In simulations with groups ranging from 4 to 256 individuals, the team found that altruism could evolve. The benefits that cooperation conferred on a group outweighed its costs to individuals – but only in groups of less than about 10. Ancestral human hunter-gatherer bands are thought to have numbered 30 or more individuals, so how could cooperative behaviour have evolved and spread in these groups?

The answer lies in the fact that strong reciprocity is not simply a matter of cooperation; it also requires punishment of those who fail to toe the line. When the team added punishment to their models, they found it made a huge difference. In a second round of simulations, they included a new kind of individual: the “punishers”. These punishers were not only willing to cooperate with others but also to punish cheats. By making cheats pay for their antisocial actions, they tipped the balance towards cooperation. This time, competition between groups led to the emergence of cooperation in groups of up to 50 individuals (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 100, p 3531).

So it would seem entirely possible that self-interest and altruism are not as incompatible as Rand made them out to be. In fact, it could be that altruism is the most selfish of all moral codes. How’s that for a paradox? Not one that many Randians would find easy to swallow. Coming to think of it, neither would many altruists.

Update: Larry thinks I’m disagreeing with him. I’m not! I find it absolutely terrifying that union bosses are directly manipulating nation budgets.

It was Larry’s reference to Rand that reminded me of the New Scientist article, which I found interesting because it cast some doubt on some of Rand’s ideas about altruism, as well as supplying some new information on which one might develop an improved philosophy of altruism and self-interest.

My apologies for not separating the two trains of thought more clearly.

Last night, Mandy and I made our second visit to Yummyaki, a Japanese food restaurant at the corner of Northfield and Davenport in Waterloo. I really like it. The quality of the food is excellent, though the decor is rather sparse; pedestal tables separated by chest-high partitions. The service is prompt and friendly.

The menu is perhaps not as extensive as some other local sushi joints. Neither is it as expensive. Prices are about half of what you’d pay at some other local sushi joints.

Yummyaki: an excellent choice for casual Japanese eats. I recommend it.