Category: Science
Physics Sentence of the Day
Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
Interesting throughout.
Is New Zealand busting out of the Great Stagnation?
Or is this a terrifying novelty for a country which doesn’t have very strict liability law?
…a planned launch of a jetpack in New Zealand next year has bureaucrats scratching their heads, particularly as the machine’s makers say the thing can travel up to 7,000 feet in the air at speeds of 50 miles an hour.
“Think of it like a motorcycle in the sky,” says Peter Coker, chief executive of Martin Aircraft Co. Ltd., which has spent 30 years developing the Martin Jetpack here. The Martin jetpack is unique in that it is not rocket powered but has a gasoline engine driving twin-ducted fans. The latest P12 prototype, a far sleeker and shinier model than the earlier versions, will allow a pilot to fly for up to half an hour.
New Zealand is taking the prospect of jetpacks in its airspace seriously, even though the product’s price—more than $150,000—means that just a few dozen have been reserved. Most of those are going to overseas customers.
And yet there is a problem, even in “regulation light” New Zealand:
“If you land in someone’s paddock, you will always land on their prime sheep,” Mr. Kenny says, stressing that liability insurance for pilots is a must.
…Still up in the air is whether they will eventually be allowed to fly over built-up areas. The latest prototype has been certified for manned test flights in New Zealand, but it can’t be flown more than 20 feet above ground or more than 25 feet above water.
The article has other points of interest. Here are related pieces.
Martian Terroir (there is no great stagnation)
Earlier this summer, Carlos Monleon-Gendall, exhibiting as part of the always-intriguing Royal College of Art Design Interactionsend-of-year show, explored the process of wine-making as if on Mars.
In his specially designed growth chamber, a lonely vine, from a species chosen for its cold tolerance, sends its roots down into a Martian soil analogue (a hand-pulverised mix of volcanic rocks and glasses as well as ferromagnesia clays), while extending its leaves toward a Martian sun.
Monleon-Gendall’s Martian micro-environment accurately simulates UVA and UVB radiation levels as well as seasonal shifts in the red planet’s sunset and sunrise by using a NASA app developed by the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (“UVC radiation is not modeled for human health and safety reasons,” the narrator of his project video intones, reassuringly.)
There is more of interest at the link, and this seems to be the bottom line:
Such a vocabulary will help with the palate re-training necessary in order to achieve the project’s goal: to help humans “acquire a taste for other planets.”
The “markets in everything” angle is this:
To help humans catch up to his prickly, potato pioneers, Keats also sold bottles of Martian mineral water.
“The minerals, including pyroxene and ulvospinel and pigeonite, will be used by your body to make bone and tissue,” Keats explained toWired. “Exploring Mars in this way, you’ll start to go native.”
From Nicola, here is more, with good photos, and for the pointer I thank Walter Olson.
Publication day for *Average is Over*
Sinister Statistics: Do Left Handed People Die Young?
In 1991 Halpern and Coren published a famous study in the New England Journal of Medicine which appears to show that left handed people die at much younger ages than right-handed people. Halpern and Coren had obtained records on 987 deaths in Southern California–we can stipulate that this was a random sample of deaths in that time period–and had then asked family members whether the deceased was right or left-handed. What they found was stunning, left handers in their sample had died at an average age of 66 compared to 75 for right handers. If true, left handedness would be on the same order of deadliness as a lifetime of smoking. Halpern and Coren argued that this was due mostly to unnatural deaths such as industrial and driving accidents caused by left-handers living in a right-handed world. The study was widely reported at the time and continues to be regularly cited in popular accounts of left handedness (e.g. Buzzfeed, Cracked).
What is less well known is that the conclusions of the Halpern-Coren study are almost certainly wrong, left-handedness is not a major cause of death. Rather than dramatically lower life expectancy, a more plausible explanation of the HC findings is a subtle and interesting statistical artifact. The problem was pointed out as early as the letters to the editor in the next issue of the NEJM (see Strang letter) and was also recently pointed out in an article by Hannah Barnes in the BBC News (kudos to the BBC!) but is much less well known.
The statistical issue is that at a given moment in time a random sample of deaths is not necessarily a random sample of people. I will explain.
Over the 20th century, left handers have increased as a fraction of the population. Left handedness may be relatively fixed as a genetic matter but in the earlier decades of the 20th century children were strongly discouraged from exhibiting left-handedness. As a result, many “natural” lefties learned right-handed behavior and identified as right-handed adults. Over time, however, the cultural suppression of left-handedness declined and the proportion of adults exhibiting left-handedness increased, as the figure, at left, illustrates (fyi, I believe British data).
Now suppose you take a random sample of people who died in 1990. In this sample, some people will have died old and some young. Among those those who died old, however, fewer people will be identified as left-handed because the old grew up in a time when left-handedness was suppressed. As a result, the old deaths in your sample will tend to be have more right-handed people and the young deaths will tend to have more left-handed people causing you to incorrectly conclude that left-handed people die younger. Studies show that this statistical artifact can easily explain a 9 year difference in apparent mortality rates.
To make this crystal clear consider the following thought experiment (offered by Chris McManus). Imagine you take a sample of people who died recently and asked their surviving family members, Did the deceased ever read the Harry Potter novels? One would clearly find in such a sample that those who died tragically young (at age 12 let’s say) would have been much more likely to have read Harry Potter than those who died in their 90s. Despite what some might argue, however, we should not conclude that Harry Potter kills.
Hat tip: Tim Harford.
B.F. Skinner on Online Education
Skinner’s teaching machines didn’t catch on, perhaps because the technology of the time was not flexible enough, but he was right about most of the advantages of teaching machines including immediate feedback both for reinforcement and enthusiasm, individualized pacing, gamification and increases in learning speed.
Designing robots to work with humans
Here is the good news:
Workers generally warm to collaborative robots quickly. Employees are keen to offload the “mindless, repetitive stuff”, as one roboticist puts it. And because workers themselves do the programming, they tend to regard the robots as subordinate assistants. This is good for morale, says Esben Ostergaard, UR’s technology chief. In late 2012 Mercedes-Benz began equipping workers who assemble gearboxes at a Stuttgart plant with lightweight “third hand” robots initially designed for use in space by the German Aerospace Centre. The German carmaker’s parent company, Daimler, is expanding the initiative, which it describes as “robot farming” because workers shepherd the robots “just like a farmer tending sheep”.
This is interesting too:
It turns out, for example, that people are more trusting of robots that use metaphors rather than abstract language, says Bilge Mutlu, the head of the robotics laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has found that robots are more persuasive when they refer to the opinions of humans and limit pauses to about a third of a second to avoid appearing confused. Robots’ gazes must also be carefully programmed lest a stare make someone uncomfortable. Timing eye contact for “intimacy regulation” is tricky, Dr Mutlu says, in part because gazes are also used in dialogue to seize and yield the floor.
When a person enters a room, robots inside should pause for a moment and acknowledge the newcomer, a sign of deference that puts people at ease, says the University of British Columbia’s Dr Croft. Robots also appear friendlier when their gaze follows a person’s moving hands, says Maya Cakmak of Willow Garage, the California-based maker of the PR2, a $400,000 robot skilled enough to make an omelette—albeit slowly.
This is more discomforting:
The world’s largest compiler of voluntary industrial standards, the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) in Geneva, has yet to work out safety standards for collaborative robots, such as how much force a robot can safely apply to different parts of a human worker’s body.
The story is interesting throughout, hat tip goes to FT Alphaville. By the way, humans prefer working with robots which sometimes make mistakes.
Herbert Simon on stagnation and automation
In his review of a prescient work called The Shape of Automation (1966), by Herbert Simon, a manifold genius who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, Heilbroner scoffed at Simon’s notion that the average family income would reach $28,000 (in 1966 dollars) after the turn of the century: “He has no doubt that these families will have plenty of use for their entire income. . . . But why stop there? On his assumptions of a three percent annual growth rate, average family incomes will be $56,000 by the year 2025; $112,000 by 2045; and $224,000 a century from today. Is it beyond human nature to think that at this point (or a great deal sooner), a ceiling will have been imposed on demand—if not by edict, then tacitly? To my mind, it is hard not to picture such a ceiling unless the economy is to become a collective vomitorium.”
Simon responded drily that he had “great respect for the ability of human beings—given a little advance warning—to think up reasonable ways” of spending that kind of money, and to do so “without vomiting.” He was right about that, of course, even though he was wrong about the particular numbers. Nobody at the time foresaw the coming stagnation of middle-class incomes. His estimate of the average family income in 2006 translates into more than $200,000 in current dollars.
That is from an excellent piece by Daniel Akst on what we can learn from the automation crises of the 1960s.
Are we making mouse brains bigger?
Maybe urban living makes all of us smarter:
In two species — the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole — the brains of animals from cities or suburbs were about 6 percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or other rural areas. Dr. Snell-Rood concludes that when these species moved to cities and towns, their brains became significantly bigger.
Dr. Snell-Rood and Ms. Wick also found that in rural parts of Minnesota, two species of shrews and two species of bats experienced an increase in brain size as well.
Dr. Snell-Rood proposes that the brains of all six species have gotten bigger because humans have radically changed Minnesota. Where there were once pristine forests and prairies, there are now cities and farms. In this disrupted environment, animals that were better at learning new things were more likely to survive and have offspring.
Studies by other scientists have linked better learning in animals with bigger brains. In January, for example, researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden described an experiment in which they bred guppies for larger brain sizes. The big-brained fish scored better on learning tests than their small-brained cousins.
There is more here, via Michelle Dawson.
The new Emily Oster book
Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong-and What You Really Need to Know.
It’s out, and if I hadn’t been giving talks in Singapore and eating pepper crab, I would have read and reviewed it by now. I will read it as soon as I can and of course I pre-ordered it once I heard about it, despite my lack of direct connection to the topic…
How to eat well in Jakarta
There are three main tiers for eating: the stalls, the food courts and restaurants in the fancy malls, and the fancy restaurants and buffets in the fancy hotels.
Oddly, standard stand-alone “restaurants” play less of a role here than in any other major city I know. (Stand-alone stores are also less important, could it be that the hot weather and traffic encourages a clumping of retail visits into large malls?) And the very small restaurants can be good, but overall I think they are dominated by the stalls.
When it comes to the stalls, you will stumble upon a bunch and then you can simply choose what looks good. Stalls in the better parts of town appear more salubrious and indeed probably are.
The food courts are good, and clean, but too homogenized for my taste. Plastic trays reign.
The fancy buffets I would never go to if I lived here, but they are a good way to sample many dishes during the course of a meal. I recommend them for tourists and newcomers. The key to eating well from them is to choose those dishes which require outside aid for their assembly.
The key question is then the optimal ratio of stalls to fancy buffets, and that depends on how many days you have in town. The fancy buffets are also better for some of the fancier dishes, for instance as might involve lamb or crabs, or for dishes from other regions of the country.
And that is how you eat well in Jakarta. Knowledge of specific restaurants is not the key here.
Glasses that solve colorblindness
…I heard from another company that makes color-enhancing glasses — this time, specifically for red-green colorblind folks. The company’s called EnChroma, and the EnChroma Cx sunglasses are a heartbeat-skipping $600 a pair.
“Our lenses are specifically designed to address color blindness,” the company wrote to me, “and utilize a 100+ layer dielectric coating we engineered for this precise purpose by keeping the physiology of the eyes of colorblind people in mind.”
That is from David Pogue, there is more here. For the pointer I thank Samir Varma.
Drone markets in everything?
Drones designed to do the bidding of ordinary people can be bought online for $300 or less. They are often no larger than hubcaps, with tiny propellers that buzz the devices hundreds of feet into the air. But these flying machines are much more sophisticated than your average remote-controlled airplane: They can fly autonomously, find locations via GPS, return home with the push of button, and carry high-definition cameras to record flight.
Besides wedding stunts, personal drones have been used for all kinds of high-minded purposes — helping farmers map their crops, monitoring wildfires in remote areas, locating poachers in Africa. One local drone user is recording his son’s athletic prowess at a bird’s angle, potentially for recruiting videos.
The reference to the wedding stunt is this:
Kevin Good thought there was an 80 percent chance he could successfully deliver his brother’s wedding rings with a tiny drone.
“The other 20 percent is that it could go crashing into the bride’s mother’s face,” the Bethesda cinematographer somewhat jokingly told his brother.
It worked. One problem is this:
…not every flier is virtuous. There are videos on YouTube of people arming drones with paintball guns. In one video — apparently a well-done hoax to promote a new video game — a man appears to fire a machine gun attached to a small drone and steer the device into an abandoned car to blow it up.
Privacy and civil rights activists worry about neighbors spying on each other and law enforcement agencies’ use of drones for surveillance or, potentially, to pepper-spray protesters.
And the law?:
Right now, drones operate under the same rules as radio-controlled planes. Commercial use is not legal…
I can promise you further updates on this story.
Computers which magnify our prejudices
As AI spreads, this will become an increasingly important and controversial issue:
For one British university, what began as a time-saving exercise ended in disgrace when a computer model set up to streamline its admissions process exposed – and then exacerbated – gender and racial discrimination.
As detailed here in the British Medical Journal, staff at St George’s Hospital Medical School decided to write an algorithm that would automate the first round of its admissions process. The formulae used historical patterns in the characteristics of candidates whose applications were traditionally rejected to filter out new candidates whose profiles matched those of the least successful applicants.
By 1979 the list of candidates selected by the algorithms was a 90-95% match for those chosen by the selection panel, and in 1982 it was decided that the whole initial stage of the admissions process would be handled by the model. Candidates were assigned a score without their applications having passed a single human pair of eyes, and this score was used to determine whether or not they would be interviewed.
Quite aside from the obvious concerns that a student would have upon finding out a computer was rejecting their application, a more disturbing discovery was made. The admissions data that was used to define the model’s outputs showed bias against females and people with non-European-looking names.
The truth was discovered by two professors at St George’s, and the university co-operated fully with an inquiry by the Commission for Racial Equality, both taking steps to ensure the same would not happen again and contacting applicants who had been unfairly screened out, in some cases even offering them a place.
There is more here, and I thank the excellent Mark Thorson for the pointer.
Elon Musk’s hyperloop
I cannot speak to the technical issues (a very critical and very interesting take is here) but I wonder where the real gain is (there is a Musk pdf overview of the hyperloop here). You can already fly LA to San Francisco in about an hour. Is saving that time so important, noting that in the best case scenario the hyperloop still takes 35 minutes?
You might object that such a plane trip takes far more than an hour, all things considered. But a hyperloop trip also will involve getting to the station, parking, waiting for departure, and perhaps TSA security as well. What is supposed to be the net time gain, all things considered? It would be cheaper to let up on the TSA procedures a bit, and even if we don’t do that surely there is no “regulatory arbitrage” case per se for building a hyperloop (“the TSA won’t budge, so I have this new and easy-to-implement idea…”).
Flying is carbon-negative, but of course building and running a hyperloop would be too. In any case, it is hard to believe that a hyperloop is the marginally cost effective way to reduce carbon emissions, compared to say shutting down some more dirty coal or pricing traffic congestion.
How about putting working wireless, or maybe cable TV, into all LA to SF plane flights? That would make time in the plane a lot more like time on the couch and in essence lower the time cost of flying. We could even teach people to read books or let them keep their Kindles on during take-off, a rumored change which may even be in the works.
In other words, the whole Hyperloop thing seems to me like a publicity stunt. I’m still waiting on that 24-7 Kindle access thing.
The binding constraint for a lot of transport improvements is getting the land rights (can it all be on top of I-5? how much do pylons cost?) and overcoming local opposition. I say the hyperloop proposal only makes that harder.
When it comes to transportation at least, There is a Great Stagnation.
p.s. under the counterfactual where the thing is built, what would the price be? Here is some skepticism from Brad Plumer.