Category: Science
A Debate on Nuclear Power
GMOs come to Europe, sort of
The potato, the first genetically engineered organism to be allowed in the European Union in more than a decade, was planted on 16 acres of land on the fringes of this town in southwestern Sweden, after a quarter century of bureaucratic wrangling.
Although inedible, Amflora is a kind of miracle potato on two counts: for one, there is its starch content, which makes it precious to the starch industry, a major employer in Sweden; and then there is its feisty resilience in surviving some 25 years of tests, regulations, rules, ordinances and applications for approval by both Sweden and the European Union, of which Sweden is a member.
Here is more information. I had not know that GMOs were given partial European clearance in 2004, though they still face very stringent regulatory obstacles.
More Evidence for the Slartibartfarst Principle
Earlier I wrote that due to the Slartibartfarst principle,
…the evidence for intelligent design ought to be readily available in the graffiti of DNA. "Slartibartfast was here," or perhaps "3.14159265," or given what we know of economics, "All rights reserved, MegaCorp. Call for a free estimate."
The fact that, as of yet, we don't see this kind of signature in the data is evidence against intelligent design.
With yesterday's announcement we have a bit more evidence favoring the premise of my argument.
To distinguish their synthetic genome from the naturally occurring version, the researchers encoded a series of watermarks into the sequence. They began by developing a code for writing the English alphabet, as well as punctuation and numbers, into the language of DNA–a decoding key is included in the sequence itself. Then they wrote in their names, a few quotations, and the address for a website people can visit if they successfully crack the code.
Life as advertisement, this is the wave of the future!
And Craig Venter said, “let there be life.”
Claims I wish I understood
There is undoubtedly an elusive quality to the gauge/string duality. As well established as it is on technical grounds, it is just strange to have a fifth dimension that isn't really a dimension like the ones we know and love. It's there not so much as a physical direction, but as a concept that describes aspects of the physics of four dimensions. Ultimately, I'm not convinced that the six extra dimensions of string theory as a theory of everything will be more tangible than the fifth dimension of the gauge/string quality.
That is from Steven S. Gubser's The Little Book of String Theory. There is much in this book I did not understand, but I've seen plenty of popular physics books over the last few years. This is the first one in a long time that I both wanted to read and finished; it's full of fresh material, fresh at least to me.
Here is a podcast on gauge theory and economics, which I have yet to listen to.
A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows
I've wondered about this plenty, though I was hoping for a simpler model:
We formulate a mathematical model for daily activities of a cow (eating, lying down, and standing) in terms of a piecewise affine dynamical system. We analyze the properties of this bovine dynamical system representing the single animal and develop an exact integrative form as a discrete-time mapping. We then couple multiple cow "oscillators" together to study synchrony and cooperation in cattle herds. We comment on the relevant biology and discuss extensions of our model. With this abstract approach, we not only investigate equations with interesting dynamics but also develop interesting biological predictions. In particular, our model illustrates that it is possible for cows to synchronize \emph{less} when the coupling is increased.
For the pointer I thank Michael F. Martin. Here is a claim that cows tend to align north-south. Here is further discussion.
How good are RCTs in economics?
K., a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
Doesn't all this RCT stuff strike you as being too easy and atheoretical? Where's the connection between running RCTs and the standard first year grad school toolkit?
I mean beyond the obvious "we have to figure out how to allocate scarce resources". I fear that RCTs will, if not they are already, lead people to basically stop doing economics. I mean look at the development in econometrics that has taken place since the 70s – these were all motivated by the fact that economics must rely on observational data yet claim causality. Although to this point there is the QJE 2004 paper which discusses the improvement to standard error calculations that must be made while using panel data. But its the only paper I can think of which has contributed somewhat to an understanding of economics.
Also, I simply can't shake the feeling that the Ester Duflo school is too much of an institution. Being from India, it feels a little insulting that someone in Cambridge Massachusetts will decide policy in rural India while earning some 6 figure salary in dollars.
My view on RCTs is simple. Economists have tried lots of methods, why should we not try to study what actually works and what does not? It's not as if a) our other methods are all so spectacularly wonderful, or b) RCTs have been shown to lead to some kind of disaster. Most of all, they are radically under-applied, in large part for reasons of cost and implementation. Whatever you think of the quality of current RCTs, future RCTs in economics are likely to be better.
The main danger with RCTs is that, in development economics, they will lead to an excess focus on social engineering as a driver of development. They also will lead people to focus on problems which are amenable to success by piecemeal social engineering, which in turn will lead to biases in our understanding and a neglect of big picture questions about economic growth. Still, while we should take those problems seriously, they would be the result of the success of the method and any successful method will bring such biases.
Since the RCT method, in economics, requires a lot of $$ to implement and thus it will not spread with the same facility as did experimental economics, which is far cheaper (though still more expensive than econometrics).
RCTs are also one way to see how context-dependent are the results of empirical economics. If giving lentils works in India but not Uganda, that's worth knowing and how else are we to obtain that knowledge?
Here is Chris Blattman on alternatives to RCTs. The cited Acemoglu paper is here.
China (India) fact of the day
China alone loses between 100 million and 200 million tons of coal each year to mine fires, as much as 20 percent of their annual production, according to the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, based in Enschede, Netherlands. The Institute estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from these fires are as high as 1.1 billion metric tons, more than the total carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles in the United States. Second to China is India, where 10 million tons of coal burns annually in mine fires, contributing a further 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
The full article is here and I thank Jim Ward for the pointer.
Why do products please us less than experiences?
The always-interesting Katja Grace links to some explanations and comments on this issue; here is Katja:
We compare products more than experiences, and since products are doomed to not be the best we could ever have got, we are sad. When we don’t compare, we are happy.
This requires one of two things:
- that when we can’t compare something, we assume it is better than average
- that we find knowing how something compares displeasing in itself unless the thing is the best.
Either of these seem like puzzling behaviour. Why would we do one of them?
A related reason is that we are more like to reevaluate products, which sit around and get reused and become less novel, than we are to fundamentally reevaluate experiences.
From the comments
Natasha C. writes:
I have not seen this mentioned in any comments (or Tyler's post) but consider this: there are at least some men who would support the idea of cloning themselves, I doubt there are many women who would do so. Are men more narcissistic or is there something else at work?
One possibility is that men are more insecure about paternity than women are about maternity, and so they demand greater similarity. The lower variance of female reproduction results is related to this, noting that the would-be male cloners are outliers of some kind rather than the median. What other explanations can you think of?
Blogs about the professions and what they are like
Richard, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
For the last couple months I've been following the FemaleScienceProfessorblog (http://science-
professor.blogspot.com/). It's basically about the professional life of a biology professor. It's not fascinating or thought-provoking in the way MR is. Much of the time, it's really rather mundane, which is the whole point. Reading it, I feel like I know much more about what it's like to be in a professional position much like hers. It's not cluttered with really any other random stuff; every new post that comes in from her, I know what I'm getting.Here's my request: I'd love to find 5-10 more blogs like this. I don't even particularly care what professions, but I'd like to get a non-glamorized, relatively even-handed inside view of other professions. I certainly would have loved to have had a few dozen of these to follow when I was trying to make career choices…
This is a good question, but I have nothing to offer. Would MR readers care to make some suggestions?
Hi, Neanderthal!
A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world indicates that such extinct species interbred with the ancestors of modern humans twice, leaving their genes within the DNA of people today.
The article is here, including a link to the original research, which is published in the highly reputable Nature. I am not able to evaluate this result, but it does seem newsworthy and also from a reputable source. Hat tip goes to the ever-excellent The Browser.
Serious question: even if it is true only probabilistically, should I be happy or sad about this news?
The Back-up Plan
The journals of the American Economic Association have started an experiment that acknowledges the reality that papers move from one publication to another — and the system could save authors considerable time, and publications money. In the experiment, authors of papers that are rejected from the flagship journal — American Economic Review — can now opt to have referee reports sent directly to one of four other journals published by the association.
So far it looks like a near-Pareto improvement. Here is more detail; by the way, editors from sociology and anthropology say that plan wouldn't work in their disciplines, though neuroscience has a reviewing consortium.
Accounting for Carbon Offsets
Highly complex, difficult to value assets are being evaluated by a handful of firms with strong ties to the financial corporations whose job it is to market those assets to investors around the world. Sound familiar?
It's not mortgages but carbon offsets and not only are the issues related many of the same players are involved. Harpers has a good piece (subs, try also here (pdf)) with more details than I have seen elsewhere on how the market works. It's not all bad, as the author, Mark Schapiro shows, the measurement infrastructure that has been created is actually quite impressive, but not enough effort has been put into monitoring. Here's one good bit:
In this highly specialized new industry, perhaps
a thousand people really understand how
onsite measurement of CDM projects works,
and there is a serious potential for conflicts of
interest. It is not uncommon for validators and
verifiers to cross over to the far more lucrative
business of developing carbon projects themselves–
and then requesting audits from their
former colleagues. Schneider points out that
young university graduates entering the field
commonly spend several years learning the
ropes at DOEs and then “go to work for a carbon
project developer, where they make three
times the salary doing more interesting work.”
These developers–which partner with local
businesses and governments to set up offset projects–
are by and large funded or owned outright
by multinational firms, particularly financial
houses such as JP Morgan Chase, which owns
the biggest developer in the world, Eco-Securities; Goldman Sachs, which has a significant interest in the largest U.S.-based developer,
Blue Source; and Cantor Fitzgerald, which owns
CantorCO2e, another major player….
Is IQ much less heritable for the poor?
I'll read this work through, once I get home.