Category: Science
Why I am not entirely bullish on brain-computer interface
I agree that miracles may well be possible for disabled individuals, but I am less certain about their more general applicability. Here is one excerpt from my latest Bloomberg column:
Another vision for this technology is that the owners of computers will want to “rent out” the powers of human brains, much the way companies rent out space today in the cloud. Software programs are not good at some skills, such as identifying unacceptable speech or images. In this scenario, the connected brains come largely from low-wage laborers, just as both social media companies and OpenAI have used low-wage labor in Kenya to grade the quality of output or to help make content decisions.
Those investments may be good for raising the wages of those people. Many observers may object, however, that a new and more insidious class distinction will have been created — between those who have to hook up to machines to make a living, and those who do not.
Might there be scenarios where higher-wage workers wish to be hooked up to the machine? Wouldn’t it be helpful for a spy or a corporate negotiator to receive computer intelligence in real time while making decisions? Would professional sports allow such brain-computer interfaces? They might be useful in telling a baseball player when to swing and when not to.
The more I ponder these options, the more skeptical I become about large-scale uses of brain-computer interface for the non-disabled. Artificial intelligence has been progressing at an amazing pace, and it doesn’t require any intrusion into our bodies, much less our brains. There are always earplugs and some future version of Google Glass.
The main advantage of the direct brain-computer interface seems to be speed. But extreme speed is important in only a limited class of circumstances, many of them competitions and zero-sum endeavors, such as sports and games.
Nonetheless I am glad to the FDA is allowing Neuralink’s human trials to proceed — I would gladly be proven wrong.
Selective reporting of placebo tests in top economics journals
Placebo tests, where a null result is used to support the validity of the research design, is common in economics. Such tests provide an incentive to underreport statistically significant tests, a form of reversed p-hacking. Based on a pre-registered analysis plan, we test for such underreporting in all papers meeting our inclusion criteria (n=377) published in 11 top economics journals between 2009-2021. If the null hypothesis is true in all tests, 2.5% of them should be statistically significant at the 5% level with an effect in the same direction as the main test (and 5% in total). The actual fraction of statistically significant placebo tests with an effect in the same direction is 1.29% (95% CI [0.83, 1.63]), and the overall fraction of statistically significant placebo tests is 3.10% (95% CI [2.2, 4.0]). Our results provide strong evidence of selective underreporting of statistically significant placebo tests in top economics journals.
That is from a new paper by Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, and Yifan Yang.
The Politics of Academic Research
We develop a novel measure of political slant in research to examine whether political ideology influences the content and use of academic research. Our measure examines the frequency of citations from think tanks with different political ideologies and allows us to examine both the supply and demand for research. We find that research in Economics and Political Science displays a liberal slant, while Finance and Accounting research exhibits a conservative slant, and these differences cannot be accounted for by variations in research topics. We also find that the ideological slant of researchers is positively correlated with that of their Ph.D. institution and research conducted outside universities appears to cater more to the political party of the current President. Finally, political donations data confirms that the ideological slant we measure based on think tank citations aligns with the political values of researchers. Our findings have important implications for the structure of research funding.
Here is the full article by Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner.
*Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death*
By Nick Lane, here is one excerpt:
Should NASA and other space agencies back missions to Mars, or to the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, Enceladus and Europa? If light is essential for the origin of life, then Enceladus is the last place to look, as those who favour warm ponds are quick to assert. But if life emerges from deep-sea hydrothermal vents, then Enceladus is an ideal place to look, as beneath its icy crust is a liquid ocean bubbling with hydrogen gas and small organic molecules, to judge from the plumes that jet hundreds of miles into space through cracks in the ice. It’s the first place I’d look.
Arguably even more important are the practical connotations for metabolism and our own health today. Is the Krebs cycle at the heart of metabolism because life was forced into existence that way, by thermodynamics — fate! — or was this chemistry invented later by genes, just a trivial outcome of information systems that could be rewired, if we are smart enough? Is the difference between ageing and disease an tractable outcome of metabolism, written into cells from the very origin of life, or a question for gene editing and synthetic biology to come? That in turn boils down to genes first or metabolism first? The thrust of this book is that energy is primal — energy flow shapes genetic information. I will argue that the structure of metabolism was set in stone (perhaps literally in deep-sea rocky vents) from the beginning.
Among the other things I learned from this book are the importance of Otto Warburg, why men get mitochondrial diseases more than women do (there is some speculative component here), why respiration is suppressed with age, why the brain prefers to burn glucose, what it might mean to think of cancer as “growth-based” rather than genes-based, and most of all the importance of the Krebs cycle and reverse Krebs cycle for a broader array of biological questions. The final section considers why chloroform seems to rob fruit flies of their “consciousness.”
I can’t pretend to evaluate the more controversial claims of the author, but at the very least I learned a great deal reading this book and it has stimulated my interest in the topic areas more generally. You can buy it here.
Model this upper atmospheric infrasound
A solar-powered balloon mission launched by researchers from Sandia National Laboratories carried a microphone to a region of Earth’s atmosphere found around 31 miles (50 km) above the planet called the stratosphere. This region is relatively calm and free of storms, turbulence and commercial air traffic, meaning microphones in this layer of the atmosphere can eavesdrop on the sounds of our planet, both natural and human-made.
However, the microphone in this particular study also heard strange sounds that repeat a few times per hour. Their source has yet to be identified. The sounds were recorded in the infrasound range, meaning they were at frequencies of 20 hertz (Hz) and lower, well below the range of the human ear. “There are mysterious infrasound signals that occur a few times per hour on some flights, but the source of these is completely unknown,” Daniel Bowman of Sandia National Laboratories said in a statement.(opens in new tab)
No, I don’t think it is “UFOs,” but perhaps by now it should be clear we really don’t know what is going on up there? And it really would e good if we did. Here is the full story.
Kevin Bryan on LLMs and GPTs for economic research
Here is the talk. I am waiting for someone to do some background “anthropological” research and field work, and create a fully simulated economy of say a village of five hundred people. (It is not difficult to have LLMs simulate human responses in economic games.) After that, the social sciences will never be the same again.
New blog on science and economic growth
By economist Jack Leach, here is the blog. Here is a post on the Greek origins of modern science.
Lessons from the COVID War
In preparation for a National Covid Commission a group of scholars directed by Philip Zelikow (director of the 9/11 Commission) began interviewing people and organizing task forces (I was an interviewee). The Covid Commission didn’t happen, a fact that illustrates part of the problem:
The policy agenda of both major American political parties appear mostly undisturbed by this pandemic. There is no momentum to fix the system….The Covid war revealed a collective national incompetence in governance….One common denominator stands out to us that spans the political spectrum. Leaders have drifted into treating this pandemic as if it were an unavoidable national catastrophe.
The results of this early investigation, however, are summarized in Lessons from the COVID WAR. Overall, a good book, not as pointed or data driven as I might have liked (see my talk for a more pointed overview), but I am in large agreement with the conclusions and it does contain some clarifying tidbits such as this one on the Obama playbook.
Innumerable speeches, books, and articles have stated that the Obama administration gave the incoming Trump administration a “playbook” on how to confront a pandemic and that this playbook was ignored. The Obama administration did indeed prepare and leave behind the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”
But this playbook did not actually diagram any plays. There was no “how.” It did not explain what to do…when it came to the job of how to contain a pandemic that was headed for the United States in January 2020, the playbook was a blank page.
I also appreciated that Lessons has some some unheralded success stories from the state and local level. You may recall Tyler and I blogging repeatedly in 2020 about the advantages of pooled tests. Eventually pooled testing was approved but I haven’t seen data on how widely pooling was adopted or the effective increase in testing capacity that was produced. Lessons, however, offers an anecdote:
In San Antonio, a local charitable foundation paired with a blood bank to create a central Covid PCR testing lab (antigen tests were not yet readily available) that could combine samples (pooling) for efficiency and cost reduction, but also determine which individual in a pool was positive. Importantly, results were available within about twelve hours. That meant results were available before the start of school the new day.
The program helped San Antonio get kids back into the schools.
More generally, it’s striking that US schools were closed for far longer than French, German or Italian schools. See data at right on the number of weeks that “schools were closed, or party closed, to in-person instruction because of the pandemic (from Feb. 2020-March 2022)”. (South Korea, it should be noted, had some of the most advanced online education systems in the world.)
One general point made in Lessons that I wholeheartedly agree with this is that the school closures and many of the other controversial aspects of the pandemic response such as the lockdowns and mask mandates “were really symptoms of the deep problem. Without a more surgical toolkit, only blunt instruments were left.” With better testing, biomedical surveillance of the virus and honest communication we could have done better with much less intrusive and costly policies.
Addendum: See my previous reviews of Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread, Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, Slavitt’s Preventable and Abutaleb and Paletta’s Nightmare Scenario.
Addendum 2: A typo in Lessons had France closing schools for 2 weeks instead of 12 weeks. Corrected.
My Conversation with the excellent Kevin Kelly
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
…Kevin and Tyler start this conversation on advice: what kinds of advice Kevin was afraid to give, his worst advice, how to get better at following advice, and whether people who ask for advice really want it in the first place. Then they move on to the best places to see traditional cultures in Asia, the one thing in Kevin’s travel kit he can’t be without, his favorite part of India, why he’s so excited about brain-computer interfaces, how AI will change religion, what the Amish can teach us about tech adoption, the most underrated documentary, his initial entry point into tech, why he’s impressed by the way Jeff Bezos handles power, the last thing he’s changed his mind about, how growing up in Westfield, New Jersey affected him, his next project called the Hundred Year Desirable Future, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Do you ever feel that if you don’t photograph a place, you haven’t really been there? Does it hold a different status? Like you haven’t organized the information; it’s just out on Pluto somewhere?
KELLY: Yes, I did. When I was younger, I had a religious conversion and I decided to ride my bicycle across the US. And part of that problem — part of the thing was that I was on my way to die, and I decided to leave my camera behind for this magnificent journey of a bicycle crossing the US. It was the most difficult thing I ever did, because I was just imagining all the magnificent pictures that I could take, that I wasn’t going to take. I took a sketchbook instead, and that appeased some of my desire to capture things visually.
But you’re absolutely right. It was a little bit of an addiction, where the framing of a photograph was how I saw the world. Still images: I was basically, in my head, clicking — I was clicking the shutter at the right moments when something would happen. That, I think, was not necessarily healthy — to be so dependent on that framing to enjoy the world.
I’ve learned to wean myself off from that necessity. Now I can travel with just a phone for the selfies that you might want to take.
COWEN: Maybe the earlier habit was better.
Recommended. And here is Kevin’s new book Excellent Advice: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.
A Systematic Review of Human Challenge Trials, Designs, and Safety
One of the most bizarre aspects of the COVID era was the institutional unwillingness to perform human challenge trials, which likely would have sped up vaccines and other treatments and saved lives. We let people join the military, indeed we advertise to encourage people to join the military, but for some reason running a human challenge trial is considered ethically fraught.
A new review find that HCTs are quite safe–more evidence that we have too few of these trials.
Human challenge trials (HCTs) are a clinical research method in which volunteers are exposed to a pathogen to derive scientifically useful information about the pathogen and/or an intervention [1]. Such trials have been conducted with ethical oversight since the development of the modern institutional review system of clinical trials in the 1970s. More recently, there has been renewed discussion about the ethical and practical aspects of conducting HCTs, largely fueled by interest in conducting HCTs for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Past reviews of HCTs focused on reporting methods [2] and safety for single pathogens [3–6], but these did not explicitly evaluate the safety of HCTs by assessing reported adverse events (AEs) and serious adverse events (SAEs) across a range of pathogens. Furthermore, many additional HCTs have been performed since the publication of these reviews. To better inform discussions about future uses of HCTs, including during pandemic response, this article presents a systematic review of challenge trials since 1980 and reports on their clinical outcomes, with particular focus on risk of AEs and risk mitigation strategies.
Hat tip: Alec Stapp.
In Defense of Merit
An excellent paper co-authored by many luminaries, including two Nobel prize winners:
Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities.
Great work! The only problem? See where the paper was published (after being rejected elsewhere).
Emergent Ventures Africa and Caribbean, third cohort
Dr. Keabetswe Ncube is a Geneticist from South Africa. Her EV grant is for her work in using statistical and genetic inferences to help rural farmers maximize yields.
Frida Andalu is a petroleum engineer by training from Tanzania and a Ph.D. candidate. Her EV grant is to assist in her research of developing plant-based volatile corrosion inhibitors to mitigate top-of-line corrosion in natural gas pipelines.
Desta Gebeyehu is a biochemical researcher from Kenya. Her EV grant is to assist in her research of developing bioethanol-gel fuel from organic waste.
Bobson Rugambwa is a software engineer from Rwanda. After graduating with a master’s from Carnegie Mellon University he co-founded MVend to tackle the problem of financial inclusion in Rwanda.
Sylvia Mutinda is a Chemist and Ph.D. researcher from Kenya. Her EV grant is to assist with her search on strigolactone biosynthesis focusing on countering striga parasites in sorghum farms in Kenya.
Dr. Lamin Sonko, born in the Gambia and raised in the U.S., is an Emergency Medicine physician and recent Wharton MBA graduate. He is the founder of Diaspora Health, an asynchronous telemedicine platform focused on patients in the Gambia and Senegal.
Cynthia Umuhire is an astronomer from Rwanda and Ph.D. researcher. She works as a space science analyst at the Rwanda Space Agency. Her EV grant is to assist her in establishing a knowledge hub for junior African researchers in space science.
Brian Kaaya is a social entrepreneur from Uganda. He is the founder of Rural Solars Uganda, a social enterprise enabling rural households in Uganda to access electricity through affordable solar panels.
Shem Best is a designer and urban planning enthusiast from Barbados. His EV grant is to start a blog and podcast on urban planning in the Caribbean to spur discourse on the built environment in the Caribbean and its impact on regional integration.
Susan Ling is an undergraduate researcher from Canada. Her EV grant is to continue her research on biodegradable, long-acting contraceptive implants with a focus on Africa, and general career development
Elizabeth Mutua is a computer scientist and Ph.D. researcher from Kenya. Her EV grant is to assist in her research on an efficient deep learning system with the capacity to diagnose retinopathy of prematurity disease.
Youhana Nassif is the founder and director of Animatex, the biggest animation festival in Cairo, Egypt. His EV grant is for the expansion of the festival and general career development.
Esther Matendo is a Ph.D. candidate in food science from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her EV grant is to assist in her research on plant-based treatments of mycotoxin contamination on maize in South Kivu (one of the main maize production zones in the DRC).
Alex Kyabarongo is a recent graduate of veterinary medicine from Uganda. He is now a political affairs intern at the Implementation Support Unit of the Biological Weapons Convention at the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs in Geneva. His EV grant is for general career development.
Margaret Murage is a Ph.D. researcher from Kenya. Her EV grant is to assist in her research of developing new photosensitizing agents for photodynamic therapy for cancer treatment.
Kwesiga Pather, for design and development of low-cost drones for agricultural uses in Uganda and general career development.
Dr. Sidy Ndao is a materials engineer by training from Senegal. He is the founder and President of the Dakar American University of Science and Technology (DAUST). The university provides a rigorous American-style English-based engineering education to African students.
Chiamaka Mangut is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University from Nigeria. Her EV grant is to fund new field research using archaeobotanical methods to study ancient populations in the Jos Plateau.
Dr. Yabebal Fantaye is Cosmologist by training from Ethiopia. He is the co-founder of 10 Academy, a training bootcamp to assist recent graduates of quant fields to acquire remote data science-related jobs.
For his very good work on these award I wish to heartily than Rasheed Griffith. And here is a link to the previous cohort of Africa winners.
The first recorded scientific grant system?
“Encouragements” from the French Académie des Sciences, 1831-1850.
The earliest recorded grant system was administered by the Paris-based Académie des Sciences following a large estate gift from Baron de Montyon. finding itself constrained in its ability to finance the research of promising but not-well-established savants, the academy seized on the flexiblity afford by the Montyon gift to transform traditional grands prix into “encouragements”: smaller amounts that could broaden the set of active researchers. Even though the process was highly informal (the names of the early recipients were not published in the academy’s Compte rendus), it apparently avoided suspected or actual cases of corruption…Throughout the 19th century, however, the academy struggled to convince wealthy donors to abandon their preference for indivisible, large monetary prizes in favor of these divisible encouragements.
That is from the Pierre Azoulay and Danielle Li essay “Scientific Grant Funding,” in the new and highly useful NBER volume Innovation and Public Policy, edited by Austan Goolsbee and Benjamin F. Jones. (But according to the book’s own theories, shouldn’t the book be cheaper than that?)
Executive in Residence, Math Talent Search
Who We Are: Carina Initiatives
Carina Initiatives is a philanthropic fund working to send more kids from more communities to the frontiers of science and technology. We see math as fundamental to future innovation; as such, we fund and support organizations that work to inspire, unearth, and train math talent.
Here is the link. This has the promise to be an important post, but it needs the right person.
A Mosquito Factory?!
A “mosquito factory” might sound like the last thing you’d ever want, but Brazil is constructing a facility capable of producing five billion mosquitoes annually. The twist? The factory will breed mosquitoes carrying a special bacteria that significantly reduces their ability to transmit viruses. As far as I can tell, however, the new mosquitoes still suck your blood.
Nature: The bacterium Wolbachia pipientis naturally infects about half of all insect species. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit dengue, Zika, chikungunya and other viruses, don’t normally carry the bacterium, however. O’Neill and his colleagues developed the WMP mosquitoes after discovering that A. aegypti infected with Wolbachia are much less likely to spread disease. The bacterium outcompetes the viruses that the insect is carrying.
When the modified mosquitoes are released into areas infested with wild A. aegypti, they slowly spread the bacteria to the wild mosquito population.
Several studies have demonstrated the insects’ success. The most comprehensive one, a randomized, controlled trial in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, showed that the technology could reduce the incidence of dengue by 77%1, and was met with enthusiasm by epidemiologists.
In Brazil, where the modified mosquitoes have so far been tested in five cities, results have been more modest. In Niterói, the intervention was associated with a 69% decrease of dengue cases2. In Rio de Janeiro, the reduction was 38%3.
Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes have already been approved by Brazilian regulatory agencies. But the technology has not yet been officially endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which could be an obstacle to its use in other countries. The WHO’s Vector Control Advisory Group has been evaluating the modified mosquitoes, and a discussion about the technology is on the agenda for the group’s next meeting later this month.