Paul Natsuo Kishimoto - 2017

Using LaTeX in 17.310J

2017-09-13T00:00:00+02:00

As a Technology & Policy Program student, you need to prepare a research thesis for your S.M.; if you're in another MIT graduate program, you will likely also need to prepare a thesis or academic publication at some point during your degree!

Why? Compared to Microsoft Word, the LaTeX document preparation system can save you considerable time in writing your thesis, as well as other documents such as academic publications and the writing assignments for Science, Technology, and Public Policy. At the same time, the results will be more elegant, readable, reusable, and reproducible. STPP coursework is a great opportunity to begin climbing the LaTeX learning curve.¹

This post, and possibly subsequent posts, will contain opinionated² tips and links to resources. I'm also offering (perhaps foolishly) to help with any thorny LaTeX problems.³

Please e-mail or post in the comments below with any suggested additions or resources that you find helpful in your LaTeX learning.

Getting started with Overleaf

Eventually, you will want to install LaTeX on your own computer—especially for working without Internet access. But for a quick start, Overleaf is a great option. It's a collaborative, in-browser LaTeX editor; analogous to Google Docs.

Here is a template for the paper topic memo. Please duplicate this project: go to your Overleaf dashboard/“My Projects” page, click the down arrow at right, and select “Open a Copy”.

Bibliographies & the `17.310j-fa17` repo

BibTeX and BibLaTeX (don't worry about the distinction) are powerful tools for citations and bibliographies. They allow you to free up mental space & effort from worrying about the trivialities of APA, MLA, Chicago or other citation styles.

You instead use a BibTeX database with entries that look like this:

@book{viscusi-2005,
    author = {Viscusi, W. Kip and Harrington, Jr., Joseph E. and Vernon, John M.},
    edition = {4},
    isbn = {9780262220750},  % print edition
    publisher = {MIT Press},
    title = {Economics of Regulation and Antitrust},
    year = {2005},
}

and then, in your document, cite the entry using its key—here, viscusi-2005. Most popular citation management tools—Mendeley, Zotero, etc.—and most journal and library websites support import/export of citations in BibTeX format.

When your LaTeX document is compiled, BibLaTeX takes care of formatting both the citations and bibliography entries. Switching styles is as simple as changing an option, and many advanced features and customization options are offered.

17.310J-fa17 is a Github repository where I will maintain a BibTeX database with some of the course readings. If you'd like to contribute to this database and are familiar with git and Github,⁴ please fork it, add any entries, and submit a pull request.

Advanced topics

Another post on using the Atom editor for writing LaTeX documents.

Nothing is free; LaTeX is not entirely painless to learn and use. The chief difficulty is that error messages are sometimes cryptic, and one needs to learn how to ‘debug’: isolate part of a document that's interrupting compilation. ↩
As with any Free Software, there are many ways to skin a cat, and appropriate choices differ with task, context, and the skills of yourself or your collaborators. Here are only recommendations and opinions that I feel are appropriate for the context (solo work, mostly beginners) and tasks (simple papers) in this course. ↩
Though co-learning with your classmates will often work just as well; Google is your friend, as is Stack Exchange; and you can always try to RTFM. Good troubleshooting skills are part of LaTeX knowledge! ↩
Note that you can get a free Github subscription using your MIT e-mail address at education.github.com. ↩

China to ban the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs)—Bloomberg

2017-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

Bloomberg reports:

Xin Guobin, the vice minister of industry and information technology [MIIT], said the government is working with other regulators on a timetable to end production and sales [of fossil-fuel powered vehicles]. The move will have a profound impact on the environment and growth of China’s auto industry, Xin said at an auto forum in Tianjin on Saturday.

This is, no doubt, a major announcement. China is the world's largest market for light-duty vehicles (LDVs; cars and light trucks), so the impact will be greater than that of earlier statements from governments in the UK and France. On the other hand, there's a long road between articulating goals and putting rubber on the road. We can imagine the ways a nascent ban will complicate existing policy issues, and raise new ones. Here, I sketch and phrase a number of these as questions.

When?

There's no doubt that the market dominance of the ICE will end. The relatively low cost of electricity, the higher efficiency of EVs, the continually-dropping cost of batteries, and improvement in other technologies¹, will in the long run combine to overcome the obstacles facing alternative powertrains.

Put another way: ICEVs would someday all but disappear, even in the absence of a ban.

How much does China's government want to accelerate this timeline? This is a key indicator of the level of importance assigned to this goal. If we imagine ICEV market share gradually declining to single digits by, say, 2045, then a ban by 2040 does little. The ban will not come about overnight, but at the end of a phase-out period for ICEVs.
LDVs have a useful life of about 10–15 years.² What will happen to the many LDVs on the road on the day the ban becomes complete? Will they be allowed to continue in use? For how long? These questions point to a wedge between the end date of ICEVs sales and the end of their energy demand and GHG and pollution emissions. We can imagine a scenario where Chinese roads ca. 2060 resemble those of Havana, Cuba, with carefully-preserved, decades-old gasoline cars still in use.
(How) Will the timing align with China's goals within the UN FCCC? Decarbonizing transport will be one of the most costly and difficult aspects of mitigating climate change. Does a ban fit within a complete strategy to achieve an emissions trajectory for stabilization at the targeted level of <2°C?

Who & why?

China's central government had previously announced goal of 8, 10 and 12% EVs in sales in upcoming years, with a credit trading system for firms unable to meet the target. These targets were recently delayed/watered down, after lobbying from both foreign and domestic automakers.

This episode raises all the familiar issues from existing and past efforts at LDV regulation, including the U.S. CAFE standards, biofuel mandates, and tailpipe emissions regulation.

How will the Chinese government determine when, and at what cost, automakers can replace ICEVs in their offerings? Firms face strong incentives to make this transition appear costly and difficult. Even if they see the policy as inevitable, this steering of knowledge used in policymaking can buy them time to find ways to comply.
What opportunities for competitive advantage will firms and countries see in the timing and terms of the ban?
- If China's domestic and JV automakers make a serious push to phase out ICEs on an aggressive timeline, they could develop capacities or technologies that position them well to compete internationally.
- On the other hand, in the near term, foreign manufacturers seem to have the technology advantage, and might benefit from a phase-out that begins in the next few years; unless special consideration is given to domestics.
Cities with vehicle license plate quotas are currently home to more than 100 million Chinese. In some of these systems, EV buyers are exempt from the need to participate in a license plate lottery or auction; an huge implict subsidy of up to USD 15,000, on top of the explicit ones. How would these exemptions—and the quotas themselves—change in the run-up to a ban? With what effects?

What & how?

What's being banned? Cynically, an EV is a “fossil-fuel powered vehicle” if the electricity powering it is generated by burning coal—as may largely be the case in China for many years. A ban on “combustion engine vehicles”—as I've taken the article to mean—is entirely different. The Bloomberg article doesn't contain a direct quote from the vice minister.
How to create policy certainty? It's very easy—as the recent EV quota example shows—to push back dates; a lesson that's also familiar to followers of carbon pricing. A ban can be an effective policy instrument if it follows a timeline that removes, rather than creates, risk for firms that act early to phase out the banned technology; yet there are many handy reasons to delay.
Aside from grandfathering of ‘pure’ ICEVs, what exemptions might exist? The UK announcement was quickly given the caveat that range-extended EVs—like the Chevy Volt—would meet the terms of that ban. Hence the word ‘pure’: internal combustion engines would continue to exist, so long as they weren't the sole component in a drivetrain. Will China offer a similar exemption to cover long-distance driving?
What of trucks and heavy-duty vehicles? The stakeholders and impacts in this market have significant differences and similarities to the LDV market. Road freight vehicles are still a larger component of energy demand and source of GHG and air pollution emissions in China. Policy targeting only ICEVs would leave a huge gap.

for instance, hydrogen fuel cells for longer-range uses. ↩
in the transition to shared mobility, there's been some discussion that cars will face heavy-duty use, and be built for a shorter life—perhaps around five years. ↩

LaTeX using Atom

2017-04-10T00:00:00+02:00

I use LaTeX for my academic work. For some time Atom has been my editor of choice. Over the years, I've migrated through a variety of workflows, including using dedicated editors like LyX to write my S.M. thesis.

Atom is not a dedicated LaTeX editor, but it is immensely popular. Consequently it has many useful features and packages that I've found improve my productivity for writing code (LaTeX documents are, after all, code).¹ Some of these are LaTeX-specific, but many are not.

See previous writing on this use-case by Matteo Merola and others.

TeX environment & packages

I write on Ubuntu, but most of the following are available for Mac OS or—with more difficulty—Windows.

TeX Live

This is the LaTeX distribution available with Ubuntu. By default it contains most of the packages listed below. I work with the default versions, with a small number of exceptions for “fast-moving” packages.²

beamer

For slides and posters. See the LaTeX Wikibook for an introduction.

Metropolis is an attractive, simple, modern theme for beamer. Because it uses more common TrueType (instead of TeX) fonts, it must be compiled with XeLaTeX—pass the -xelatex option to latexmk.
My TeX repository contains a derived MIT IDSS theme.

biblatex

BibLaTeX is a much-advanced, highly-configurable version of the old, BibTeX reference management software.

I keep my BibTeX database in a separate directory and Git repository from my publications. My ~/.profile file sets the $BIBINPUTS environment variable so that any LaTeX compilation can find it:
```
export BIBINPUTS=$HOME/Documents/reference:$BIBINPUTS
```
The LaTeX Wikibook has a handy table of entry and field types in BibLaTeX files.
KBibTeX is a useful GUI for editing my BibTeX database, when I need to. If the localfile key is defined for an entry, it has a pane that shows an embedded view of the PDF.

pgfplots

Generate figures and tables. Installed manually from version control:

git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/pgfplots/code pgfplots
cd pgfplots
git checkout 1.14  # or latest version

Use \pgfplotsset{compat=1.14} to disable compatibility features.

gitinfo2

Installed manually. Watermark documents according to the revision information of the Git repository that contains them.

Own scripts, mini-packages & snippets

My scripts repository contains command-line tools I use to help writing LaTeX documents:

bib

Some collected utilities in Python for managing a BibTeX database.

Commands:
  check_files  Check files listed with the 'localfiles'...
  import       (DEV) Read new entries into the database.
  kw_list      List all keywords appearing in entries.
  queue        Display a reading queue.

install-latexmk

Install an up-to-date latexmk on Ubuntu. Version 4.41 (in Ubuntu 16.10) fails to properly recompile BibLaTeX files in some instances.

My TeX repository also contains some ‘mini’ packages and snippets of code:

unicode-extra: Define Unicode characters like →γ₂ so they can be used directly in equations—much more concise than \rightarrow\gamma_2.
zh: A command \zh{北京} for short Chinese texts in non-CJK documents.

Atom features & built-in packages

For Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts, substitute Cmd for Ctrl, or search in the Atom settings for the list of key bindings. The Atom documentation contains descriptions of other features.

Toggle line comments (Ctrl+/)

This is one of the default editor features. To debug LaTeX errors, isolate lines (or Beamer frames) that may contain the problem: select large chunks of your document, Ctrl+/ to comment them out, and recompile. Once you've found and spotted the errors, use Ctrl+/ to reverse.

Multiple cursors

Use Shift+Alt+{Up,Down} to add cursors above and below the current cursor(s), or use Ctrl + click to put a cursor anywhere. Any new characters typed, backspaces, or deletions will happen at every cursor simultaneously. This lets you quickly make changes that may be harder to find-and-replace.⁵

To make this feature more useful, keep your code indented and aligned so you can easily, for instance, add a decimal point to all the numbers in a table:

\begin{tabular}{lc}
  Foo & Bar \\
   12 &  10 \\
    1 & 100 \\
\end{tabular}

…or prepend \ttfamily to the description of each list entry:

\begin{description}
  \item [First] list entry.
  \item [Second] list entry.
\end{description}

Bracket matching

Leaving off a trailing } in LaTeX can lead to immense headaches in debugging. Use Ctrl+M (go to matching bracket) at any { to find its partner—if the cursor doesn't move, there isn't one, and you've made a mistake.

This package also lets you select all text inside the current brackets, jump to the nearest enclosing bracket, and remove all brackets inside a selection. Use the command palette (Ctrl+P) or set a shortcut for each of these commands.

Snippets

When starting a new LaTeX environment, such as \begin{itemize}, type the first few letters of the name, and press Tab. A complete environment is inserted, with a closing tag, so you don't forget it later. Snippets are customizable.

Git line diffs

Easily identify which parts of source files have changed since the last commit. The file tree also colours changed or new files.

Community Atom packages

language-latex

Syntax highlighting for LaTeX.

linter-chktex

Linter plugin for LaTeX using chktex, requires linter. A linter searches your code for ‘lint’; not errors, but little mistakes in comparison to proper style or syntax. I write with this package disabled, and only turn it on briefly when I'm finalizing a document or debugging, since it's very opinionated.

For instance, chktex will complain about The time since 1900 A.D. has been… because the final . would be misintepreted as ending a sentence, when in fact it should be followed by an interword space (.\ ).

build-make → GNU make → latexmk

Depends on build. make looks for a Makefile in the root of your project, and executes commands based on rules in this file. I use it in concert with latexmk, a program which understands how to run pdflatex, biblatex, and other programs repeatedly to compile a document (and ships with TeX Live). For this, it is sufficient to have a Makefile with the following:

all: paper.pdf

paper.pdf: paper.tex
    latexmk -pdf $<

In this setup, Atom (build-make) invokes make, and make in turn invokes latexmk, which decides whether paper.tex (or any the other files on which it depends) has changed and recompiles as needed.

build-make can be configured to either invoke make every time a file is saved, or only when a command (default: F9) is given. The former is fine for simple documents, but for complex documents that take some time to compile it usually results in my laptop sounding like a jet engine, distracting me from writing.

To avoid a messy command line, put options to latexmk in a file .latexmkrc:

# Generate PDFs by default
$pdf_mode = 1;
# -file-line-error: more readable output on errors
# -shell-escape %O %S: allow pdflatex to invoke programs like pygmentize
$pdflatex = "pdflatex -file-line-error -shell-escape %O %S";
# Suppress most output from pdflatex etc.; check the .log file
$silent = 1;

and give latexmk -r /path/to/.latexmkrc on the command-line.

wordcount

Counts words!

zen

Full-screen the editor and hide everything but the text.

Other packages

Some other LaTeX-specific packages for Atom that I haven't found a need for or don't use, with reasons:

latexer: Certain LaTeX-specific autocompletions.
autocomplete-bibtex: Autocompletion for BibTeX citations. I either am referring to a small number of papers which I've read (exhaustively) and for which I know the citation keys; or am working on a literature review, in which case I have KBibTeX open.
latex-plus: Appears to be unmaintained.
latex: A package for running latexmk with some options. The build and build-make packages, being more general, are better maintained; also I use make to do things besides compile LaTeX documents.³
pdf-view: I use Evince, the default document viewer on Ubuntu.⁴

My work often involves switching back and forth between a document, and code to support what I'm writing: primary analysis; post-processing code that produces figures and tables; and Hydrogen for quick calculations. Using a general-purpose editor, I can have these as different tabs in the same application, rather than different applications. ↩
TeX Live comes out with a new release every year, and Ubuntu releases every six months, so this entails any feature that I really need within a year of its being developed. Most popular LaTeX packages are fairly static, and new features cover use-cases that don't apply to my work. ↩
A subject for another post. ↩
My greatest complaint about Atom is performance. Atom is built on the Electron framework that includes the open-source version of Google Chrome. This is highly optimized for running JavaScript, but is not always as fast as native code. I have an old (ca. 2013) Dell XPS 13 laptop, and I also run Gitkraken client for Github & friends—another Electron program; so I am running three browsers, which can bog down my system considerably. pdf-view makes this problem worse. ↩
However, find and replace using regular expressions is an immensely powerful skill that rewards invested time, especially when changes have to be made to similar, but not identical, text throughout a document. Atom has both file- (Ctrl+F) and project-level (Ctrl+Shift+F) find and replace. ↩

Barcodes

2017-01-30T00:00:00+01:00

Source: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2006), via Imgur 1, 2.

Source: Rebecca Cook / Reuters (29 January 2017), via The Atlantic.

This is the first time I've seen, in person or a photograph, a poster or billboard containing only a QR code—with no accompanying text.¹ The code contains a link to this clip from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940):

One exception was a Google recruiting ad on the side of a bus shelter from ca. 2011, but I can't find any reference to it. ↩

Cansplained: Executive orders

2017-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

Cansplain (v): (not to be confused with mansplain)

to nicely explain something about the United States, to Canadians;
vice versa.

Within minutes of one another, two people asked me to cansplain executive orders. Donald Trump is signing a lot of these, and people are distressed because they're seeming to do all kinds of terrible things. What are they?

You could, of course, read Wikipedia. Here's a fast-and-loose version.

Bureaucracy

Most of the work of government happens in a bureaucracy that's organized into units that I will call ‘departments’. There are some important differences:

Thing	Canada	United States
Head of government	Member of Parliament who is the leader of the party with the most seats.	Elected directly through the Electoral College; not a member of Congress.
Example department	Health Canada	Health & Human Services
Head of department	‘Minister’ (usually)	‘Secretary’
How chosen	Elected as a Member of Parliament, then appointed by the Prime Minister.	Appointed by the President, then confirmed by the (elected) Senate.

And some similarities:

The legislature (Parliament or Congress) passes enabling legislation saying, “There shall be a Department of such-and-such, and its responsibilities are to do X, Y, and Z.” In this way, it delegates its authority, so that it doesn't have to pass a new law each time something (for instance) health-related must be done. The legislature might also:
- set up processes of rule-making, so that when large departments change what they do in ways that affect many people, they are required to give advance notice, consult the public, study the anticipated effects, etc.
- later pass amendments to empower (“also do U, V, and W”) or limit (“you are not allowed to get involved in A, B, or C”) departments.
- through the budgets it passes each year, add restrictions or conditions on funding (“it is forbidden to spend money on A, B, or C”), and control departments' actions by providing or withholding money.
The Minister or Secretary³ can order the staff of the department to do pretty much anything, as long as it doesn't:
1. Overstep this specific authority given to the department by the legislature, or
2. Break the laws generally (including doing unconstitutional things).
If there's a dispute on either of these points, that's where (in both countries) the courts get involved, and may order government to do, or stop doing, certain things.

And, of course, things cost money.

Executive orders

In the U.S., the President will sign executive orders, short documents directing one or more departments to do (or stop doing) certain things. His appointed heads of department then carry these things out. To my knowledge, EOs are entirely customary. That is, the President is not required to issue them; (s)he could simply phone the department head. But most presidents have chosen to do so, since EOs were first used.

In Canada, essentially the same thing could happen! However, in practice, decisions are often made by Cabinet in confidence, and then implemented with no signed document or proclamation ever coming from the Prime Minister's office.¹

Who's more powerful?

To sidestep trenchant opposition in Congress, Barack Obama did many things by EO, instead of gambling on laws that might not pass. This means they were carefully designed to only contain actions that fit the criteria above. In turn, Trump can neatly nullify the same actions, also by EO.

If (hypothetically) a U.S. President were to stop issuing EOs altogether and make policy by directing his appointees off-the-record, I suspect people might scream bloody murder, certain that undesirable things were happening. Yet in Canada, this happens every day! For this reason, Mark Jaccard and others refer to Canadian First Ministers (Premiers and the PM) as “temporary dictators.”

Three Conservative governments under Stephen Harper pursued policies that many Canadians disagreed with—yet some of these actions were not clearly signalled or only became known after the fact, because there was no custom of issuing EOs or notices of Cabinet decision. It will be interesting to see whether the different mechanism in the U.S., by giving opponents of the Trump Administration more advance warning, will allow them to organize more effective opposition.²

This is part of why Canadians instead see documents like the fairly vague “budgets” booklets issued by federal governments, or ad-hoc products like the Conservatives' “Economic Action Plan”. These function as statements of policy goals, but on the other hand don't order specific actions, so they can seem vague. ↩
Or, worse, whether a Trump administration will eschew the use of EOs! ↩
and therefore, the head of government. ↩

Use people's names

2017-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

I often feel that I spend too much time engaged in online political discussion. As I do, I'm aware that this likely does little to change political outcomes—who gets elected, and what policies they pursue—that concern me and drew me to those discussions in the first place. This is because:

I am stuck in my own communities of like-minded people, and
Any other person who stumbles across my posts and comments is unlikely to be swayed by reading them, no matter the tone.

All this said, I still try my best to enter or start discussions that help people learn or evolve their viewpoints. In order to do so, I have a few rules of thumb, or engagement.

The simplest is to use people's names, and where possible the actual names of groups.

Once a discussion gets slightly heated, it is only a matter of time until someone drops an epithet like Drumpf, Shillary, Harpoid, McGuilty, CLOWNservative, or libtard. Subtler examples depend on context, and might include leftist, Trumpkin, or the use of a diminutive or first name, like Iggy.

Of course, satire, including calling people ridiculous titles and names, political cartoons, and the like, has a valuable political function, in that it refuses seriousness demanded by those who aren't owed deference. But when tossed off lazily in the context of a putative, earnest debate, such names aren't satire, nor are they particularly clever.

Instead, they attempt to provoke an angry reaction that reduces the chance of any participant or observer learning anything, or changing her mind. They signal lack of respect for others, and thus an unwillingness to countenance or engage with their views.

So: don't use them! As a corollary, when people do, make a point of using correct names in response, and not rising to the bait.

Paul Natsuo Kishimoto - 2017

Using LaTeX in 17.310J

Getting started with Overleaf

Bibliographies & the 17.310j-fa17 repo

Advanced topics

China to ban the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs)—Bloomberg

When?

Who & why?

What & how?

LaTeX using Atom

TeX environment & packages

Own scripts, mini-packages & snippets

Atom features & built-in packages

Community Atom packages

Other packages

Barcodes

Cansplained: Executive orders

Bureaucracy

Executive orders

Who's more powerful?

Use people's names

Bibliographies & the `17.310j-fa17` repo