Category: Science
Actual significant technological progress, at least potentially
Drought tolerance would be the most significant new biotech trait introduced in the near future, Mr James said, “because drought is, by far, the single most important constraint to biotech to increased productivity for crops worldwide”. Monsanto will launch the first drought tolerant GM maize in the US this year.
From the FT, here is more. Furthermore this is additional evidence that we have been wise to stick with GM crops.
Quotations from China
“The genetic basis of intelligence has been ignored for a very long time,” says Mr. Zhao. “Our data will be ready in three months’ time.”
There is more here. Here is some further explanation:
At the Hong Kong facility, more than 100 powerful gene-sequencing machines are deciphering about 2,200 DNA samples, reading off their 3.2 billion chemical base pairs one letter at a time. These are no ordinary DNA samples. Most come from some of America’s brightest people—extreme outliers in the intelligence sweepstakes.
Sentences to ponder
Our drone future?
(In case you’re worried that drones lack allies in Congress, rest easy: there’s a Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus with 60 members. With global spending on drones expected to nearly double over the next decade, to $11.3 billion, industry groups like the AUVSI are rapidly ramping up their lobbying budgets.)
And:
Singer estimates that there are 76 other countries either developing drones or shopping for them; both Hizballah and Hamas have flown drones already. In November, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 17 years for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with remote-controlled planes.
The very interesting article is here, by Lev Grossman at Time, hat tip goes to The Browser.
The Tang Prize
Taiwanese businessman Samuel Yin has endowed a new science prize that not only gives bigger cash awards than the Nobel Prizes, but supports research as well. Individuals or institutions that have demonstrated what judges deem to be the most creative and influential research will receive about $1.36 million in each of four fields; an additional $341,000 will support recipient-proposed plans for research and talent development in related fields for 5 years. The combined $1.7 million tops the Nobel Prize, which for 2012 was about $1.2 million.
Announced at a press conference today in Taipei, the Tang Prize, named after China’s Tang Dynasty, which Yin admires as a golden age for Chinese civilization, will be awarded biennially for work in sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology, and rule of law.
Yin, who is endowing the Tang Prize Foundation with about $102 million, hopes “the prize will encourage more research that is beneficial to the world and humankind, promote Chinese culture, and make the world a better place,” according to a press release. Yin made a fortune in real estate, finance, and retail investments, and is worth about $3 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Academia Sinica, which oversees Taiwan’s premier research labs, will be responsible for the nomination and selection process. The first prize announcement is slated for July 2014.
The link is here and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson. This goes back to a discussion I have regularly with John Nye. If you simply put up money — say for a new prize or even for a new university, and try to spend that money well — but don’t court the traditional markers of status per se, how far can you get?
Surely Harvard faculty would never say anything like this
SPIEGEL: How do we have to imagine this: You raise Neanderthals in a lab, ask them to solve problems and thereby study how they think?
Church: No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.
SPIEGEL: Wouldn’t it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?
Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it’s not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.
I find this a pretty outrageous and indefensible set of sentiments, and I am one who would like to see the United States target a higher population of 500 million through increased immigration.
It must be a misquotation. And please note that “Church” is not in fact “The Church” responding, but rather Professor George Church of Harvard University.
Here is more, with numerous hat tips to those in my Twitter feed.
How will offices evolve?
Designers talk of digital walls, which have sensors embedded so you can interact with them.
Or, if you want the professor’s technical explanation, “dye sensitised solar cells with titanium oxide layers on a surface with light absorbing dye molecules adsorbed on surface which can generate electricity”.
These walls will build up a profile of you and change your working environment accordingly.
This could mean the lighting around your desk dims slightly when you arrive, or a pre-determined microclimate is created for your meeting.
Nano stateThe technology that enables this interaction, known as “nano-coating”, will basically turn your cold, unfeeling office into an expressive medium
It could mean the moment you enter the building your workspace starts preparing itself for your imminent arrival – even if you are hot-desking.
Here is more, via Michelle Dawson.
Questions which are rarely asked
All Scrabble players know that Q and Z are the highest scoring tiles. You can get 10 points for each, in the English language version of the game.
But according to one American researcher, Z really only deserves six points.
And it’s not just Z that’s under fire. After 75 years of Scrabble, some argue that the current tile values are out of date as certain letters have become more common than they used to be.
“The dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed,” says Joshua Lewis, researcher and creator of a software programme which allocates new, up-to-date values to Scrabble tiles.
“Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play.”
Here are some details on the reforms:
According to Lewis’s system, X (worth eight points in the current game) is worth only five points and Z (worth 10 points now) is worth six points.
Other letter values change too, but less radically. For example, U (one point currently) is worth two in the new version, G (two points) becomes three and M (three points) becomes two.
Here is more, via @timharford, and here is further information.
What should we be afraid of?
That is the topic of the new Edge symposium and many of the answers are interesting. Here is the take from Bruce Sterling, who fears that when it comes to the Singularity there is “no there there”:
Since it’s 2013, ten years have passed since Vernor Vinge wrote his remarkably interesting essay about “the Singularity.”
This aging sci-fi notion has lost its conceptual teeth. Plus, its chief evangelist, visionary Ray Kurzweil, just got a straight engineering job with Google. Despite its weird fondness for AR goggles and self-driving cars, Google is not going to finance any eschatological cataclysm in which superhuman intelligence abruptly ends the human era. Google is a firmly commercial enterprise.
It’s just not happening. All the symptoms are absent. Computer hardware is not accelerating on any exponential runway beyond all hope of control. We’re no closer to “self-aware” machines than we were in the remote 1960s. Modern wireless devices in a modern Cloud are an entirely different cyber-paradigm than imaginary 1990s “minds on nonbiological substrates” that might allegedly have the “computational power of a human brain.” A Singularity has no business model, no major power group in our society is interested in provoking one, nobody who matters sees any reason to create one, there’s no there there.
So, as a Pope once remarked, “Be not afraid.” We’re getting what Vinge predicted would happen without a Singularity, which is “a glut of technical riches never properly absorbed.” There’s all kinds of mayhem in that junkyard, but the AI Rapture isn’t lurking in there. It’s no more to be fretted about than a landing of Martian tripods.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The Army of Economists
In a wide-ranging and interesting conversation Daniel Dennett reflects on hypocrisy and whether it may sometimes be optimal:
Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it’s as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.
Which army do you want on the front lines? It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you’re saying is we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It’s extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they’re doing the right thing? What if I’m clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It’s a dilemma that I don’t know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least.
It would be astounding if there were never a situation in which a lie was effective in producing a good result, i.e. a noble lie. But is a rule of noble lies effective? In a long sequence of calls to war, how many have been just and wise and how many have been driven by vainglorious leaders and foolish pride–so which army do you want? I prefer the silver.
Note also that Dennett mixes narrow self interest and rationality in his description of “economists.” But one can be fully rational without being narrowly self-interested. Dennett, for example, cheats a bit with his puzzle. The premise is some “horrific, terrible enemy” but then later the economists ask “am I so sure this cause is just”, to which the answer should be, given the premise, yes. In which case fighting is a rational response.
Hat tip: Brian Donohue.
What is the critical view on the lead-crime correlation?
Here is a report from Scott Firestone. He does admit that much of the evidence carries some weight, but he is less persuaded when it comes to cohort studies:
It turns out there was in fact a prospective study done—but its implications for Drum’s argument are mixed. The study was a cohort study done by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. Between 1979 and 1984, 376 infants were recruited. Their parents consented to have lead levels in their blood tested over time; this was matched with records over subsequent decades of the individuals’ arrest records, and specifically arrest for violent crime. Ultimately, some of these individuals were dropped from the study; by the end, 250 were selected for the results.
The researchers found that for each increase of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, there was a higher risk for being arrested for a violent crime, but a further look at the numbers shows a more mixed picture than they let on. In prenatal blood lead, this effect was not significant. If these infants were to have no additional risk over the median exposure level among all prenatal infants, the ratio would be 1.0. They found that for their cohort, the risk ratio was 1.34. However, the sample size was small enough that the confidence interval dipped as low as 0.88 (paradoxically indicating that additional 5 µg/dl during this period of development would actually be protective), and rose as high as 2.03. This is not very convincing data for the hypothesis.
For early childhood exposure, the risk is 1.30, but the sample size was higher, leading to a tighter confidence interval of 1.03-1.64. This range indicates it’s possible that the effect is as little as a 3% increase in violent crime arrests, but this is still statistically significant.
I don’t have any particular view on this matter, but if you wish can you read Drum’s response here.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.
Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics
That is the new paper by David Card and Stefano DellaVigna, here is the abstract:
How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-5 journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15% to 6%, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars. Third, one journal, the American Economic Review, now accounts for 40% of top-5 publications, up from 25% in the 1970s. Fourth, recently published papers are on average 3 times longer than they were in the 1970s, contributing to the relative shortage of journal space. Fifth, the number of authors per paper has increased from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012, partly offsetting the fall in the number of articles per year. Sixth, citations for top-5 publications are high: among papers published in the late 1990s, the median number of Google Scholar citations is 200. Seventh, the ranking of journals by citations has remained relatively stable, with the notable exception of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which climbed from fourth place to first place over the past three decades. Eighth, citation counts are significantly higher for longer papers and those written by more co-authors. Ninth, although the fraction of articles from different fields published in the top-5 has remained relatively stable, there are important cohort trends in the citations received by papers from different fields, with rising citations to more recent papers in Development and International, and declining citations to recent papers in Econometrics and Theory.
Kevin Kelly on why Robert Gordon is wrong
This is a very good piece. Here is the closing bit:
In his paper Robert Gordon talks about the huge value gained from “one-time” events, such as the one-time (first and last) move of a large proportion of women into the workforce. This new gain happens only once (assuming they remain). In this computer-internet economy we are experiencing a one-time gain from a huge one-time event. This is the first and only time a planet will get wired up into a global network. We are alive at this critical moment in history, and we are just at the beginning of the beginning of the many developments that will erupt because of this shift.
Cory Doctorow has interesting comments.
Restrictions on high skill immigration to Britain
From The Independent:
Russian-born physicist Professor Sir Andre Geim said new restrictions on non-European Union immigrants, including minimum salary requirements of at least £31,000 and tighter student visa rules, are blocking the brightest academics from working at British institutions. He told The Independent on Sunday that the restrictions would have prevented him and his team from identifying the revolutionary “super-material” graphene, which earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.
Sir Andre warned that future scientific breakthroughs at British institutions were at risk because of the tighter controls, introduced this year to bring down annual net migration from more than 200,000 to “tens of thousands”.
..Sir Andre, 54, first arrived in the UK in the early 1990s as a Russian citizen with a permit to work as a post-doctoral fellow at Nottingham University. His salary would have been around £27,000 in today’s money, meaning that he would have been barred from entry under the minimum salary requirement.
FYI, Geim is one of my favorite scientists of all time. He is the only individual to win both a Nobel prize, for graphene, and an Ig Nobel prize, for frog levitation. Awesome!
Profile of John Ioannidis
He is an important thinker and here is one part of the profile:
Ioannidis’s current work stems from his deep love of math and statistics. He was born in New York City to physician parents but raised in Athens, Greece, where he excelled at math from a young age. He attended the University of Athens Medical School, added a PhD in biopathology, and later trained at Harvard and Tufts and joined the National Institutes of Health, where he worked on pivotal HIV research. These days, although he often collaborates on the design of specific studies, what he mostly does is meta-research, or the study of studies. Using powerful number-crunching programs and constantly evolving algorithms, Ioannidis analyzes many trials, each with many patients. He’s working to see not so much whether one treatment works or does not work, or whether one association of a specific risk factor with one disease is true or false, but whether factors related to the research process—the number of patients tested, the criteria for including data, statistical errors in an analysis, even fraud or financial incentives—may have compromised the data and conclusions. He burst on the medical establishment radar in 2005 with a paper in PLoS Medicine asserting nothing less than: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Here is Alex’s earlier post on him. For the pointer I thank Mark D.