Bandit Algorithms

• Is this story true? It may be. The Gittins book was first published in 1989
• The name comes from the 1950s when Frederick Mosteller and Robert Bush decided to study animal learning and ran trials on mice and then on humans. The mice faced the dilemma of choosing to go left or right, after starting in the bottom of a T-shaped maze, not knowing each time at which end they will find food. To study a similar learning setting in humans, a “two-armed bandit” machine was commissioned where humans could choose to pull either the left or the right arm of the machine, each giving a random payoff with the distribution of payoffs for each arm unknown to the human player.
• William R. Thompson. On the likelihood that one unknown probability exceeds another in view of the evidence of two samples. Biometrika, 1933.

7:00 – 3:00 ASRC MKT

• • Finished The Radio in Fascist Italy
    • Philip Cannistraro
    • Journal of European Studies
    • scholars have generally agreed that the control of the mass media by the state is a fundamental prerequisite for the establishment and maintenance of totalitarian dictatorships (pg 127)
    • It is not so widely acknowledged, however, that contemporary totalitarian governments have been largely responsible for the initial growth of the mass media-particularly films and the radio-in their respective countries. (pg 127)
    • In their efforts to expose entire populations to official propaganda, totalitarian regimes encouraged and sponsored the development of the mass media and made them available to every· citizen on a large scale basis. (pg 127)
    • Marconi shrewdly reminded Mussolini that it would be politically wise to place control of the radio in the hands of the state, pointing out the radio’s great potential for propaganda purposes (pg 128)
    • “How many hearts recently beat with emotion when hearing the very voice of the Duce! All this means but one thing: the radio must be extended and extended rapidly. It will contribute much to the general culture of the people” (pg 129)
    • … to insure that EIAR’s programmes conformed to the requirements of the regime’s cultural and political policies. The High Commission included government representatives from each major area of culture: literature, journalism., the fine arts, music, poetry, theatre, and films. The programmes Commission screened the transcripts and plans of all and censored the content of all broadcasts. (pg 130)
    • His broadcast, ‘The Bombardment of Adrianople’, was awaited by the public with great interest and was heralded by critics as the most significant cultural event of the Italian radio.ts Marinetti’s colourful language and emotion-packed presentation blasted un expected life into the Italian radio. His flam.boyant style introduced the concept of the ‘radio personality’ in Fascist Italy, and the success of his talk encouraged those who, like Marinetti himself, hoped to make the radio a new art form. Broadcasts by Marinetti, most of which were lectures on Futurism, continued to be heard on Italian radio each month for more than a decade. (pg 131)
    • The regime quickly recognized the effectiveness of this technique in· arousing listener interest, and it was an easy matter to transfer microphones to mass rallies from where the enthusiastic cheers of the spectators could be heard by radio audiences. (pg 132)
    • The popular announcer Cesare Ferri created the characters ‘Nonno Radio’ (Grandfather Radio) and ‘Zia Radio’ (Aunt Radio), speaking to Italian youth with unprecedented familiarity in terms they easily understood. (pg 132)
    • In order to popular arouse interest in its program.me EIAR sought to stimulate indirect audience participation through public contests for short stories, poems, songs, In and children’s fairy tales. addition, surveys were conducted among listeners to discover trends in popular taste. (pg 133)
    • The radio had an important task to fulfil in the totalitarian state, that of binding the Italians together into one nation through common ideals and a common cultural experience inspired by Fascism. (pg 134)
    • Mussolini proclaimed Radio Rurale a great achievement of the Fascist revolution, for contemporary observers saw it as a new instrument with which to integrate rural existence into the mainstream. of national life. (pg 135)
    • The measures taken by the regime to overcome cultural and political provincialism by creating a mass radio audience in the countryside met with qualified success. (pg 137)
    • Regarded by many as an important step towards the creation of a truly popular culture, Radio Btdilla’s purpose was to give the working classes of the city and the countryside the means of acquiring a radio at a modest cost. Through the radio art, instruction, music, poetry-all the cultural masterworks–cease to become the privilege and unjust monopoly of a few elitist groups’. (pg 139)
    • ‘The ministry, in carrying out its delicate functions of vigilance over radio broadcasting, must guide itself by criteria that are essentially of a political and cultural nature.’ (pg 140)
    • Once the radio had been integrated into the structure of the Ministry of Popular Culture, the Fascists began to develop m.ore effective ways of using broadcasting as a cultural medium. While the number and variety of programmes had begun to increase by the beginning of the decade, it was only after 1934 that they became politically sophisticated. (pg 141)
    • Fascist racial doctrines became a major theme of radio propaganda during World War II. An Italo-German accord signed in 1940 to co-ordinate radio propaganda between the two countries included measures to ‘intensify anti-Jewish propaganda’ on the Italian radio as well as in foreign broadcasts.78 The Inspectorate for Radio Broadcasting organized an important series of anti-Semitic prograrnm.es that centred around the ‘Protocols of Zion’, and talks such as ‘Judaism. versus Western Culture’, the ‘Jewish International’, and ‘Judaism. Wanted this War’, were broadcast from 1941 to 1943. (pg 143)
    • information received from the Vatican radio during World War II was generally regarded more accurate than the obvious propaganda broadcasts of the Allies (pg 147)
    • On the radio he astutely employed direct, forceful language, shouting short and vivid sentences to create a sense of drama and arouse emotional reactions. ‘This ‘maniera forte’ that characterized Appelius’ radio talks had a great appeal for many Italians, especially for the ‘little man’ who wanted to be talked to on his own level in terms he could readily understand.121 In his broadcasts Appelius screamed insults and ranted and raved at the foul enemies of Fascism. with a powerful barrage of verbal abuse, inciting his audiences to unmitigated hatred and scorn against the evil ‘anglo-sassoni’ and their allies. (pg 150)
    • In the broad context of Fascist cultural aspirations, all the media aimed at similar goals: the diffusion of standard images and themes that reflected the ideological values of Fascism.; the creation of a mass culture that conformed the needs of the Fascist state in its capacity as a totalitarian to government. (pg 154)
  • Next on the list, Radio: The Intimate Medium
    • Lou Orfanella
    • Radio has always had a special power. It has exerted this power from our grandparents gathered in the living room to listen to an FDR fireside chat as it crackled from a big wooden cabinet filled with glass tubes to our own summer nights of making out as Wolfman Jack howled through the dashboard speakers. There is an intimacy, a one-to-one connection that no other medium can match. (pg 53)
    • “I’m the guy that gets up with them in the morning. I’m in the shower with them, I go to work with them. It is a very intimate time.” (pg 53)
    • Something emergent in talk radio:
      • As Dan Ingram explains: “I felt they were making a major mistake, and for over fifteen years, WABC had ratings around one-point- something, until the conservative, fascist talk shows began to draw the same kind of audience that must have turned out for the spectacle of seeing someone stoned to death in Biblical times.” (pg 54)
      • Bruce Morrow, who still draws high ratings with his broadcasts over WCBS-FM, feels that “People listen because somewhere along the line, Top Forty radio became the closest thing we ever had to a national personality. Rock ‘n’ Roll became the nearest thing we’ve had to an American voice” (pg 55) – Pop culture as dimension reduction/polarization/consensus?
  • From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News
    • Sarah Sobieraj and Jeffrey M. Berry
    • Political Communication
    • The country appears to be moving toward a parliamentary-type legislature with the party in power ruling and the party out of power biding its time and doing its best to bring down its opponents. It strains credulity to believe that the new and expanded ideological media has had nothing to do with this trend. For those media commentators outside of mainstream news organizations, the red meat is good versus evil and heroes working at great odds against powerful villains. This favors the most ideological within parties, helping them raise money and gain votes in primaries when they oppose more moderate candidates (pg 36)
  • Continue on SASO slides
  • More LSTM
    • And here’s a thing on LSTM and time-series prediction
  • To get a level of visualization from Keras, I had to download graphviz from here, and then add the C:\Program Files (x86)\Graphviz2.38\bin directory to the path and restart Intellij. But now I have pix of the network!

• Might need to help Aaron out putting together GUI code. Did manage to get everything up and running on my local machine.
• DOJ CATS slide walkthrough. Found the schema for the DB?
• 3:30 Meeting with Don to discuss LSTM and topic identification. It occurs to me that this could be the paper that allows me to end the PHD by pointing out the way that JuryRoom would build maps. Possible UIST or DIS paper if framed this way?
  • Meeting went well, though we never got to the dance my PhD parts. Don suggests starting with simple statistical analysis on bag-of-words or tf-idf text
  • Don then introduced me to Aaron Mannes, and we had a nice chat about navigating belief spaces and radicalization. He also suggested looking at qntfy.com.
    • Qntfy is a technology solutions provider bridging data science and human behavior. We make complex psychological and behavioral data accessible, scalable and actionable for both individuals and organizations.

Modeling relatedness and demography in social evolution

• With any theoretical model, the modeler must decide what kinds of detail to include and which simplifying assumptions to make. It could be assumed that models that include more detail are better, or more correct. However, no model is a perfect description of reality and the relative advantage of different levels of detail depends on the model’s empirical purpose. We consider the specific case of how relatedness is modeled in the field of social evolution. Different types of model either leave relatedness as an independent parameter (open models), or include detail for how demography and life cycle determine relatedness (closed models). We exploit the social evolution literature, especially work on the evolution of cooperation, to analyze how useful these different approaches have been in explaining the natural world. We find that each approach has been successful in different areas of research, and that more demographic detail is not always the most empirically useful strategy.