Category: Science
Far UVC Sanitization Kills COVID
A new type of ultraviolet light that is safe for people took less than five minutes to reduce the level of indoor airborne microbes by more than 98%, a joint study by scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and in the U.K. has found.
…Far-UVC light has a shorter wavelength than conventional germicidal UVC, so it can’t penetrate into living human skin cells or eye cells. But it is equally efficient at killing bacteria and viruses, which are much smaller than human cells.
In the past decade, many studies around the world have shown that far-UVC is both efficient at destroying airborne bacteria and viruses without causing damage to living tissue. But until now these studies had only been conducted in small experimental chambers, not in full-sized rooms mimicking real-world conditions.
…The efficacy of different approaches to reducing indoor virus levels is usually measured in terms of equivalent air changes per hour. In this study, far-UVC lamps produced the equivalent of 184 equivalent air exchanges per hour. This surpasses any other approach to disinfecting occupied indoor spaces, where five to 20 equivalent air changes per hour is the best that can be achieved practically.
“Our trials produced spectacular results, far exceeding what is possible with ventilation alone,” says Kenneth Wood, PhD, lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews and senior author of the study. “In terms of preventing airborne disease transmission, far-UVC lights could make indoor places as safe as being outside on the golf course on a breezy day at St. Andrews.”
Here and here and here are my previous posts on UV-C sanitization. We are moving slower than I would like but the picture is of a UVC robot being used at Pittsburgh airport so kudos to them.
The virtues of seaweed collecting
Nineteenth-century seaweed albums have a baked-in melancholy. Despite the best intentions, they do not flatter seaweed. The samples are brittle where the plant was pliant, opaque when once translucent, flaccid where previously ballooned. The displacement from sea to paper steals a measure of the plants’ integrity, and time leaches away the rest. In every respect, the wonders of seaweed have fled the book. And yet, these albums still speak — not of seaweed exactly, but of the collector’s care and devotion. There is a particular kind of eros that thrums between a receptive human and the natural world; the contours and depth of this eros is the true subject of a seaweed album.
Here is much more, interesting throughout, via Jodi Ettenberg.
The cost of applying
- Rhodes Scholarships: 12,000 applications, 99.3% rejected
- National Science Foundation: 11,447 applications, 82.7% rejected
- National Institutes of Health: 55,038 applications, 79% rejected
- Nonprofit grants: too many to count, but one professional grant writer estimates 90% get rejected
These applications are hefty. Before you even start applying for an NSF grant, you should probably read the 79 pages of instructions. The NIH helpfully provides a 10-part instructional video series. Rhodes Scholarships require a mind-boggling eight letters of recommendation. I tell college seniors to expect fellowship applications to be a six-month part-time job.
All this applying doesn’t just burden applicants. Professors run themselves ragged writing recommendations. The NSF relies on volunteers to complete 240,000 reviews every year. Entire university offices exist just to manage the paperwork that grants generate; universities bill this back to funders in the form of “indirect costs,” which at Harvard go as high as 70% of incoming grant funding. Grant agencies seem not to realize that by making everything about their grants burdensome, they allow universities to spend much of the grant money managing the grant itself!
Here is more from Adam Mastroianni. Via Anecdotal.
New nuclear security grants
- Longview Philanthropy, where I work, launched a nuclear security grantmaking programme in December 2021.
- We are hiring a grantmaker to co-lead this programme alongside Carl Robichaud.
- The co-leads will make grants potentially totalling up to $10 million initially, a figure which could grow substantially if they find or create sufficiently strong opportunities.
- So far, we have committed a single $1.6 million grant to the Council on Strategic Risks. Future grants will be directed by the programme co-leads.
- We are also hiring a grantmaker who will work on other existential risks.
Here is the link with more information, via Stefan Schubert.
US Pandemic Policy: Failures, Successes, and Lessons
My talk at Bowling Green State University on US Pandemic Policy: Failures, Successes, and Lessons
This was not a black swan event. This was an entirely predicted and predictable event. We knew it was going to happen….And yet, we weren’t ready.
I am told that my talk made many people angry (not at me, natch).
Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort
Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.
Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.
Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers. Substack here.
Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!
Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.
Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.
Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore. Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.
Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.
Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.
Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.
James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.
Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.
Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.
Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.
Congratulations to you all! We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.
Who is working on creative solutions to limit nuclear war risk?
I don’t mean on the macro foreign policy side, but more the micro elements. For instance, how do we make sure all countries with nuclear weapons have accurate early warning systems, so they do not confuse flocks of birds with incoming missiles?
Your suggestions do not have to be credentialed in the traditional sense, but they should be smart, curious, and hard-working, at the very least.
I thank you in advance for the nominations.
Addendum: I am looking for actual suggestions and will delete all “soapbox” comments.
Jesse Michels interviews me at Hereticon
Jesse’s description was “Wide ranging discussion with the brilliant @tylercowen. Topics include: Satoshi’s identity, Straussian Jesus, the Beatles and UFOs. Taped in early January but he presciently expresses concerns around Russia/Ukraine”
Great fun was had by all, and they added in nice visuals.
Be Green: Buy an (Australian) Coal Mine!
In Be Green: Buy A Coal Mine! I wrote:
Buying a coal mine and leaving the coal in the ground looks like a cost-effective way of sequestering carbon dioxide.
Recall, the key idea is that there are coal mines that are barely profitable now so shuttering mines can be a cheap way of sequestering carbon dioxide. Well, it’s starting to happen in Australia.
Tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has teamed up with international fund manager Brookfield to launch an audacious takeover bid for Australian energy giant AGL with the intention of setting stronger emissions-reduction targets and forcing the early closures of its remaining coal-fired power stations.
Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, is also involved. Unclear whether the bid will be accepted. The Australian government is actually against the idea.
Addendum: Philosopher William MacAskill also told me recently that he liked the idea because it would leave a source of energy that could be used to reboot civilization after an existential crisis. Hadn’t thought about that! MacAskill is always thinking ahead.
Hat tip: Sam Roggeveen.
There will be three JPEs
We are pleased to announce that the Journal of Political Economy is launching two new journals under the JPE umbrella. The Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics and Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics will broaden the scope of high-quality theoretical and empirical papers published by the JPE journals.
That is from my email. One meta-lesson is that to date brand names in academic journals have been underexploited for a long time!
Fishy Results on Ocean Acidification
The replication crisis isn’t just about social psychology. A meta-analysis of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior shows a big decline in effect size as the studies get larger and better.
Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of 91 studies empirically testing effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior, we provide quantitative evidence that the research to date on this topic is characterized by a decline effect, where large effects in initial studies have all but disappeared in subsequent studies over a decade. The decline effect in this field cannot be explained by 3 likely biological explanations, including increasing proportions of studies examining (1) cold-water species; (2) nonolfactory-associated behaviors; and (3) nonlarval life stages. Furthermore, the vast majority of studies with large effect sizes in this field tend to be characterized by low sample sizes, yet are published in high-impact journals and have a disproportionate influence on the field in terms of citations. We contend that ocean acidification has a negligible direct impact on fish behavior, and we advocate for improved approaches to minimize the potential for a decline effect in future avenues of research. [emphasis added, AT]
No one cared about Bryan’s spreadsheets
From Bryan:
The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.
I took quality control very seriously. About half a dozen friends gave up whole days of their lives to sit next to me while I gave them a guided tour of the reasoning behind my number-crunching. Four years before the book’s publication, I publicly released the spreadsheets, and asked the world to “embarrass me now” by finding errors in my work. If memory serves, one EconLog reader did find a minor mistake. When the book finally came out, I published final versions of all the spreadsheets underlying the book’s return to education calculations. A one-to-one correspondence between what’s in the book and what I shared with the world. Full transparency.
Now guess what? Since the 2018 publication of The Case Against Education, precisely zero people have emailed me about those spreadsheets. The book enjoyed massive media attention. My results were ultra-contrarian: my preferred estimate of the Social Return to Education is negative for almost every demographic. I loudly used these results to call for massive cuts in education spending. Yet since the book’s publication, no one has bothered to challenge my math. Not publicly. Not privately. No one cared about my spreadsheets.
Here is more from Bryan Caplan. I would make a few points:
1. Work is hardly ever checked, unless a particular paper becomes politically focal in some kind of partisan dispute. You can take this as a sign that Bryan has not dented the political consensus so much, a point I think he would agree with.
2. Researchers discuss and consider your work in a particular area far, far more if you are an insider in that area, making the seminar circuit at top schools. To be clear, Bryan’s work is discussed far more by intelligent humans who are not education researchers, compared to what virtually all of the education researchers have produced. Bryan writes in internet space, where the barriers to entry are much lower. Good for him, I say (duh), but of course not everyone wishes to lower the entry barriers in this manner. And internet writing does have entry barriers of its own. For instance, Bryan has been blogging steadily for many years, which many researchers simply do not wish to do or maybe cannot do well at all.
3. Overall I think we are entering a world where “research” and “idea production” are increasingly separate endeavors. And the latter is moving to the internet, even when it is supplemented by non-internet crystallizations such as books. Bryan’s ideas, of course, have been germinating on EconLog for some time before his education book came out. Do you like this new world? What are its promises and dangers?
Comparing dogs and wolves, with reference to human self-domestication
Based on claims that dogs are less aggressive and show more sophisticated socio-cognitive skills compared with wolves, dog domestication has been invoked to support the idea that humans underwent a similar ‘self-domestication’ process. Here, we review studies on wolf–dog differences and conclude that results do not support such claims: dogs do not show increased socio-cognitive skills and they are not less aggressive than wolves. Rather, compared with wolves, dogs seek to avoid conflicts, specifically with higher ranking conspecifics and humans, and might have an increased inclination to follow rules, making them amenable social partners. These conclusions challenge the suitability of dog domestication as a model for human social evolution and suggest that dogs need to be acknowledged as animals adapted to a specific socio-ecological niche as well as being shaped by human selection for specific traits.
That is from a new article by Friederike Range and Sarah Marshall-Pescini, via Michelle Dawson.
Institute for Progress
That is a new institution founded by Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney, here is the opening of their manifesto:
We’re excited to announce that today we are launching the Institute for Progress, a new think tank in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future.
Despite exhortations that the future is sprinting towards us at an ever-increasing pace, productivity growth has been in long-term decline since the 1970s. This is supposed to be the age of ambitious at the infrastructure investments in the battle to fight climate change, but we can’t even build new solar plants without being vetoed by conservation groups. Hyperloops and supersonic airplanes promise to revolutionize transportation, but building a simple subway extension in NYC costs up to 15 times more per kilometer than it does in other cities around the world.
There is much more at the link, substantive throughout. Science policy, high-skilled immigration, and pandemic preparation will be some of their major issues. Recommended! And supported by Emergent Ventures.
How does an electric car work?
Say you were trying to teach yourself, to a 99th percentile *layperson’s* level, how, say, an electric car actually worked. How would you go about doing that, precisely?
I am not sure exactly how high (or low) a standard that is, but here is what I would do.
1. Watch a few YouTube videos.
2. Read a book or two on how electric cars work, along the way finding an expert or mentor who could answer my questions.
3. If needed, read a more general book about electricity.
4. Try to explain to someone else how electric cars work. Try again.
I would recommend this same general method for many particular questions.