The book includes many and various real-world examples and case-studies, ranging from fighting the spread of diseases such as Aids or the Guinea worm parasite in Africa, to increasing effectiveness in an American car factory, or rehabilitating life-long criminals and helping them integrate into society. Each case describes how the six factors have been targeted in order to make unwanted behavior unappealing or difficult, and new/positive behavior easy and attractive.

I’m about half way through the book at this point, and the theories and strategies provided have been quite plausible and interesting. Beyond the title, the book does not promise change to be easy. It does, however, provide a framework in which to understand a lot of human behavior and the motivation behind it, and a set of tools and strategies for influencing it. All in all, a good read so far, with a nice mix of theories and strategies, and stories to back them up and make them memorable.

One country
What has happened is terrible, and it is bound to affect us for a long time to come. The way the Norwegian leaders and people have met this however, makes me proud. Our values will remain unchanged or strengthened. To say that we will not be pushed or manipulated into fear or violence by one deluded man with a perverted ideology is to state the obvious. The last few days have been filled with hundreds of thousands of candles and flowers, moving words and songs, interspersed with quiet moments for reflection. A record number of people have been out in the streets day after day to pay their respects and share the pain, and a solemn calm has rested over the entire country in a way we have ever experienced before.

Shame, but also relief
It may sound like a strange sentiment, but I’ve heard it from many different people, and I feel it myself too: We are ashamed that the terrorist was “one of our own”, seemingly a typical, normal young Norwegian man. It disgusts us and his actions go against everything we stand for. At the same time, many of us are relieved that this was not a plot by fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, for who knows what reactions we would have seen here and in the rest of the world then? The attacks were horrible, no matter who carried them out, but as a group, the Muslims are exceptionally easy to heap together and blame these days. Thankfully the fear and anger that might then have been directed towards innocent people never materialized, since the terrorist did not live up to the stereotype so many had expected.

I think this is a subtle point that needs to be made abundantly clear: We were attacked, not in protest or retaliation by fundamental Muslims, but by a paranoid and deluded Norwegian who fears the open, friendly, multicultural society we are striving to create. In my view, the attacks themselves and the reactions following them can only confirm and strengthen our commitment to that society.

Reactions towards Muslims and our responsibilities
If some ethnic Norwegians were relieved, many Muslims were all the more so. For many, the night following the attacks had been sleepless and filled with fear of blame and repercussions. Instead Muslims are now showing their support along with everyone else. Summer Ejaz is the spokesperson for the Islamic Council in Norway, an organization that tries to help form a Norwegian-Muslim identity that can integrate well into Norwegian society, and to create dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. In an interview with the newspaper Aftenbladet he says (my own translation):

I think it [the attack] will strengthen the ties between Norwegians and immigrants. The attack has shown that the enemy can be found among all groups, and that evil can only be met with fellowship.
(Original article in Norwegian)

Given the new situation in the wake of these attacks, is there anything we can do to improve the ties between Muslims and non-Muslims? There will always to be challenges as we try to build a better society, but I believe this is an opportunity that we ought to make use of. These last few days have brought all who live in Norway closer together. Continuing this, especially with regard to that one group of people which is often eyed with such suspicion, would be the perfect protest against the man and the ideas behind the attacks on Oslo and Utøya.

Parts of the Muslim population itself has been trying to reach out to the rest of us for some time now. Take the “Tea Time”-initiative for instance, wherein Muslims are encouraged to invite their neighbors or others over for tea. Commercials aired on TV and radio encourage us to get together, for as one girl in the ad (posted below) states, those who know any Muslims do not seem to be afraid of them.

I think this is a admirable initiative, and one that deserves more attention. You can find more information (unfortunately only in Norwegian) at facebook.com/teatime, or see the commercial below.

If you are a Muslim living in Norway, what would it take for you to invite someone you don’t know over for tea? If you are a non-Muslim, would you accept? I’d like to think that I would; Who knows where such a small first step may lead in time?

Just add this to your .emacs file, and you will be able to count the words in any PDF-file. To count the words in your Latex-document, there are three steps:

• C-c C-c: Compile the PDF, as always
• C-c C-c again: Now, the generated PDF should be opened in Emacs, so you can see it, and the buffer containing it will be active.
• C-x w: This executes the code and displays the count in the minibuffer.

The result should look something like this:

24 7490 46689 /home/mystuff/mydocument.pdf.txt


The first number is the new-line count, the second is the word count, and the last is the number of bytes (in the temporary file which follows; in this case, “mydocument.pdf.txt”, which contains the extracted text from “mydocument.pdf”).

The way this works is a little crude, but it gets the job done; It actually fetches the name of the file in the currently active buffer, and creats a variable with the same name, only with “.txt” appended to it. The text in the pdf is then extracted with the Linux command “pdftotext”, and stored to a file with that name. The word count is then performed on that text using the “wc”-command, before the text-file is deleted.

PS::

• This should work on any PDF-file, as long as the text can be exported.
• If you want to use a different key-combo, just change “\C-xw” in the last line

Yesterday I came across this tip, that I hadn’t thought about: Why not switch the Ctrl-key with the Caps Lock? The latter is hardly ever used anyway! At first I thought nah, silly unnecessary idea – using the control key is not THAT big of a hassle anyway. Then today, after working en Emacs for only a short while, it became too tempting, and I decided to swap it after all. Or rather, I turned Caps into an extra Ctrl-key. The reason is that I use Ctrl + Alt and the arrow keys to switch between desktops, a combo I’ve used for years, so I wouldn’t want to mess that up.

Luckily, KDE has this sweet feature, which lets you set just these things, simple as… well, something really simple:

Under system settings -> Regional & Language

I’m still getting used to this, but I don’t think it’s going to take long. Best of all, this works across the OS, of course; opening a new window in my browser, or what ever else I might use Ctrl for is now easier. I definitely recommend giving it a whirl. Enjoy!

Anyway, I finally reached the year 0001. Then 0001 again. Yup, that’s right: There are two instances of the year 1, then nothing. I guess that means my IPod (and presumably, IPhones, IPads and possibly other I-thingies) are compatible with time travel, so long as you don’t go back beyond the birth-year of Jesus, a year that was so great, they decided to run it twice (Probably due to record sales of Christmas-related software from the App-store).

You know what is a little strange though? Although it is possible to time travel scroll forward to beyond the year 9999 (yes, right through 10000 and onwards), as soon as you let go, the dial jumps right back to 2038. So apparently, 2010 years into the past is OK, but 28 years into the future is not. I’m guessing Dr.Who would have felt cheated.

If when writing in Latex, you try to include one or more finished files into another file and only part of the final documents is generated, check if you’ve remembered to remove the final line in the included documents, typically:

\end{document}

If you don’t remove it, that line will terminate the output and your document after the first included file, leaving anything after it out.

It’s strange, how the simplest, silliest, and in retrospect, most obvious mistakes can often be the most frustrating!

You’ll find the updated version here. Enjoy!

I recently switched from KUbuntu to OpenSuse, and had to install R and XCMS again. And again, it proved difficult.

1) R is easily installed from the links to the one-click-install packages on the R-Project web page, or one of their mirrors. (I used the one from the University of Bergen, but you should be able to find the same packages under any of the mirror-sites listed at http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html ). Just look for section 1.1: “Directly installing R from this page (preferred)”.

2) Now, for the XCMS packages. This proved more difficult, but it worked in the end. What to try:

.a) INSTALLING XCMS FROM R:
Start R, and run the following commands in it (Note, if this does not complete successfully, don’t worry, we’ll get to that):

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("xcms")

(source/for more info: see the bioconductor.org page for xcms)

You MAY have everything you need, and it MAY work out fine (if so, you can jump to point 3), or you may like me, need to get some extra libraries such as NetCDF and zlib for the install to work.

.b) INSTALLING NetCDF:
Get NetCDF from here (Direct link to the gzipped tar-file).
Download that, place it in a directory, and run the following commands in the console to install it:

tar -xzf netcdf-4.0.1.tar.gz
cd netcdf-4.0.1
#"--prefix..." is optional # (installs in a
# directory other than the current):
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

This may work for you. If so, attempt to install XCMS from within R again. I was missing the programs to compile the code, and to run “make” and “make install” here, on my brand new installation. If you’re in the same situation, install the needed programs as follows:

.c) Installing GCC and MAKE:
Run the following commands in the console:

# Installs the Gnu C Compiler
sudo zypper install gcc
# Installs the "make"-utility
sudo zypper install make
sudo zypper install gcc-c++


There. Now you should repeat point 2(b) again, and then 2(a). I was missing zlib too, so the installation still would not complete.

.d) Getting and installing zlib-devel:
You can find zlib in the the OpenSuse build service, BUT what you want for this to work is the DEVEL-version, so search for the packages “zlib-devel”, and use what corresponds to your system. This package (direct link) worked for me (zlib-devel-1.2.3-140.2.i586.rpm for OpenSuse 11.2).

Now run point (2.a) again, and XCMS should be installed.

3) Xcms should now be installed. You can check that it is available for loading into R with the command:

library(xcms)

If you just get a blank new line with a “>”, and no error, Great. Congratulations, xcms is now loaded into R.

You can get a good introductory example to using XCMS here (pdf). NOTE: To run the example, you need the datasets from faahKO, which can be installed directly from within R like this:

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("faahKO")


*UPDATE: You will also need the R-package “multtest” to run the example. Some info about it is provided here, or you can simply install it directly in R like this:

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("multtest")


Hope this was helpful to someone out there!

Feel free to download and use it yourself! (The format is PDF).