Category: Science
*Nature’s Oracle*
The author is Ullica Segerstrale and the subtitle of this excellent and fascinating book is The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton. Here is one bit:
She had decided to break up with him. The reason for this…was Bill’s strange idea of marriage. Bill had told her that they should have no more than two children, of which one child would be his and another her child with another man. His girlfriend thought about this and realized she could not agree. She also wondered what lay behind this suggestion. (She probably did not recognize Bill’s experimental scenario as coming straight out of some book like Out of the Night.)
This book has many excellent lines, including:
There is a famous New Zealand expression: “Anything can be fixed with a number 8 wire.”
And:
Who carries around cyanide?
Robert Trivers makes numerous cameos as well.
Male dance moves that catch a woman’s eye
The bottom line seems to be this:
By using cutting-edge motion-capture technology, we have been able to precisely break down and analyse specific motion patterns in male dancing that seem to influence women’s perceptions of dance quality. We find that the variability and amplitude of movements in the central body regions (head, neck and trunk) and speed of the right knee movements are especially important in signalling dance quality. A ‘good’ dancer thus displays larger and more variable movements in relation to bending and twisting movements of their head/neck and torso, and faster bending and twisting movements of their right knee. As 80 per cent of individuals are right-footed, greater movements of the right knee in comparison with the left are perhaps to be expected. In comparative research, there is extensive literature on the signalling capacities of movement…Researchers have suggested that females prefer vigorous and skilled males; such cues are derived from male motor performance that provides a signal of his physical condition.
Corvid time preference is for quality, not quantity
Or so it seems from one study:
How do the corvids stack up against us? “Crows and ravens performed comparably to primates and children tested in [similar] tasks,” Hillemann said. But one difference between the avian brain and the primate brain may be the way that they consider quality versus quantity. Birds usually aren’t willing to wait in order to increase the amount of food, only to optimize the quality of their reward. “This may be unique to birds,” she adds, “because carrying a large amount of food can be disadvantageous in flight.” On the other hand, a human child can fit two marshmallows in his mouth just as easily as one. While more research is needed, this lends support to the notion that this sort of impulse control is a case of convergent evolution, having evolved independently in the avian lineage and in our primate lineage.
I found the entire post of interest.
How to improve referee performance
Via Michael Makowsky, there is a new and extremely useful paper by Chetty, Saez, and Sandor in “slides” form (pdf). Their conclusions include these:
1. Short deadlines for referees are extremely effective at increasing speed.
2. Cash incentives can generate significant improvements with salient reminders right before a deadline.
3. Even light social incentives, such as direct prods from an editor, can bring significant benefits.
More broadly, at least in this context cash incentives work, they do not displace social incentives, and attention really matters as do “nudges.”
Only Singapore markets in everything
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson, citing David Dobbs.
For legal reasons, U.S. lags in commercial drone use
In Japan, the Yamaha Motor Company’s RMAX helicopter drones have been spraying crops for 20 years. The radio-controlled drones weighing 140 pounds are cheaper than hiring a plane and are able to more precisely apply fertilizers and pesticides. They fly closer to the ground and their backwash enables the spray to reach the underside of leaves.
The helicopters went into use five years ago in South Korea, and last year in Australia.
Television networks use drones to cover cricket matches in Australia. Zookal, a Sydney company that rents textbooks to college students, plans to begin delivering books via drones later this year. The United Arab Emirates has a project underway to see if government documents like driver’s licenses, identity cards and permits can be delivered using small drones.
In the United Kingdom, energy companies use drones to check the undersides of oil platforms for corrosion and repairs, and real estate agents use them to shoot videos of pricey properties. In a publicity stunt last June, a Domino’s Pizza franchise posted a YouTube video of a “DomiCopter” drone flying over fields, trees, and homes to deliver two pizzas.
But when Lakemaid Beer tried to use a drone to deliver six-packs to ice fishermen on a frozen lake in Minnesota, the FAA grounded the “brewskis.”
Andreas Raptopoulous, CEO of Matternet in Menlo Park, Calif., predicts that in the near term, there will be more extensive use of drones in impoverished countries than in wealthier nations such as the U.S.
He sees a market for drones to deliver medicines and other critical, small packaged goods to the 1 billion people around the globe who don’t have year-round access to roads.
There is more here, via Claire Morgan.
Interview with Nate Silver about 538
Here is an excellent interview with Nate Silver about his new project, interesting throughout. Here is one bit:
People also think it’s going to be a sports site with a little politics thrown in, or it’s going to be a politics site with sports thrown in. I understand why people say that — what we’ve been known for, plus ESPN, plus ABC News. But we take our science and economics and lifestyle coverage very seriously.
Some of the interview made me a little nervous. He inveighs against New York Times Op-Ed columnists (juicy passages, click on the link if you wish), but their knowledge is more synthetic and also more novel than I think Silver recognizes. I am not sure why “predictable” points of view are necessarily less likely to be true, or less likely to be important, even though they are (to me as well) less interesting to read.
Here are some more words from Silver:
We’re not sociopaths, which means that we look at the world and have opinions. But we’re not trying to do advocacy here. We’re trying to just do analysis. We’re not trying to sway public opinion on anything except trying to make them more numerate. I would say we’re not going to do a ton of public-policy coverage. We think that space is pretty rich now with competition. I also think with something like the health-care bill, it’s going to take years to get a good sense of how that’s working and how it’s affecting the market.
That too makes me a little nervous. For instance there is the risk of assuming that the most important issues always or usually involve measurement. Technocrats who rail against the ideologies of others are often the most ideological people around, even if their biases do not line up with the political spectrum in the usual manner. Is there really such a thing as “just do analysis”? Is it not better to make the underlying value presuppositions more explicit? And why the knock at people who don’t have opinions about public affairs? They’re not sociopaths, and frankly I’m not even fully comfortable with a blanket condemnation of sociopaths.
Earlier today I was reading John Hauer’s excellent The Natural Superiority of Mules. It is a deliberately species-ist book, without a shred of objectivity, and the title reveals the blatant biases of the author. The book has data, but is not data-driven. It is “advocacy of mules driven.” Get the subtitle: “A Celebration of One of the Most Intelligent, Sure-Footed, and Misunderstood Animals in the World” (eyes roll). Yet I learned a great deal from it, and I will read any web site that can do as well.
Elephant discrimination
Elephants are able to differentiate between ethnicities and genders, and can tell an adult from a child – all from the sound of a human voice.
This is according to a study in which researchers played voice recordings to wild African elephants.
The animals showed more fear when they heard the voices of adult Masai men.
Livestock-herding Masai people do come into conflict with elephants, and this suggests that animals have adapted to specifically listen for and avoid them.
The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
There is more here.
Summers, Lomborg, Tabarrok, and Cowen on climate change
There was a brief symposium, here are the results:
Larry Summers
President Emeritus of Harvard University, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank
My sense is that cap and trade is not the route to the future. It did not make it politically in the US at a moment of great opportunity in 2009. And European carbon markets have been plagued by constant problems. And globally it’s even harder. My sense is that the right strategy has three major elements. First, as the G20 vowed in 2009, there needs to be a concerted phase out of fossil fuel subsidies. This would help government budgets, drive increases in economic efficiency and substantially reduce global emissions. Second, there needs to be assurance of adequate funding for all areas of basic energy research. As a practical matter my guess is the world will produce non fossil fuel power in the next 25 years at today s fossil fuel prices or it will fail with respect to global climate change. Third, there is a strong case for concerted carbon taxes to further discourage greenhouse gas emissions. But this is a follow-on step for after the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.
Bjorn Lomborg
Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School
The only way to move towards a long-term reduction in emissions is if green energy becomes much cheaper. If it cost less than fossil fuels, everyone would switch, including the Chinese. This, of course, requires breakthroughs in green technologies and much more innovation.
At the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate (fixtheclimate.com), a panel of economists, including three Nobel laureates, found that the best long-term strategy to tackle global warming was to increase dramatically investment in green research and development. They suggested doing so 10-fold to $100bn a year globally. This would equal 0.2% of global GDP. Compare this to the EU’s climate policies, which cost $280 billion a year but reduce temperatures by a trivial 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
Alex Tabarrok
Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University
Neither the developed nor the developing world will accept large reductions in their standard of living. As a result, the only solution to global climate change is innovations in green technology. A carbon tax will induce innovation as people demand a way to avoid the tax. A carbon tax, however, will be more politically acceptable if technologies to avoid the tax are in existence before the tax is put into place. Prizes for green innovations can blaze a path down a road that must be traveled, making the trip easier. The L-prize successfully induced innovation in LED technologies, the X-Prize put a spacecraft into near space twice within two weeks and Google’s Lunar X prize for putting a robot on the moon is close to being awarded. Prizes have proven their worth. To speed both the creation and diffusion of green technology, green prizes should be awarded at the rate of $100-$200 million annually.
Tyler Cowen
Professor of Economics, George Mason University
This is a problem we are failing to solve. Keep in mind it is not just about getting the wealthy countries to switch to greener technologies, but we also desire that emerging economies will find green technology more profitable than dirty coal. A carbon tax is one way forward but the odds are that will not be enough and besides many countries are unlikely to adopt one anytime soon. Subsidies for technology could occur at a very basic level and we could make a gamble that nuclear fusion will finally pay off. We also need a version of green technology that will fit into existing energy infrastructures and into countries which do not have the most reliable institutions. The most likely scenario is that we will find out just how bad the climate change problem is slated to be.
There are further responses at the link.
Addendum: Ashok Rao adds comments.
The most human-like computer poem?
Try this:
Long years have passed.
I think of goodbye.
Locked tight in the night
I think of passion;
Drawn to for blue, the night
During the page
My shattered pieces of life
watching the joy
shattered pieces of love
My shattered pieces of love
gone stale.
Here is (supposedly) the most computer-like human poem, “Cut Opinions,” by Deanna Ferguson:
cut opinions tear tasteful
hungers huge ground swell
partisan have-not thought
green opinions hidden slide
hub from sprung in
weather yah
bold erect tender
perfect term transparent till
I two minute topless formed
A necessarily sorry sloppy strands
hot opinions oh like an apple
a lie, a liar kick back
filial oh well hybrid opinions happen
not stopped
Here are related rankings and explanation (sort of). Was this poem written by a human or a computer? I have no idea.
Money, Status, and the Ovulatory Cycle (politically incorrect paper of the month)
That is a new research paper by Kristina M. Durante, Vladas Griskevicius, Stephanie M. Cantú , and Jeffry A. Simpson, and the abstract is here:
Each month, millions of women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Previous consumer research has found that this cycle influences women’s clothing and food preferences. The authors propose that the ovulatory cycle actually has a much broader effect on women’s economic behavior. Drawing on theory in evolutionary psychology, the authors hypothesize that the week-long period near ovulation should boost women’s desire for relative status, which should alter their economic decisions. Findings from three studies show that women near ovulation seek positional goods to improve their social standing. Additional findings reveal that ovulation leads women to pursue positional goods when doing so improves relative standing compared with other women but not compared with men. When playing the dictator game, for example, ovulating women gave smaller offers to a female partner but not to a male partner. Overall, women’s monthly hormonal fluctuations seem to have a substantial effect on consumer behavior by systematically altering their positional concerns, a finding that has important implications for marketers, consumers, and researchers.
Here is some popular coverage of the piece. For the pointer I thank C.
What I worry about
LATimes: A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.
The original research is here. Have a nice day.
Bringing extinct species back to life
It will happen, in fact it has already happened and more than ten years ago:
Novak is tall, solemn, polite and stiff in conversation, until the conversation turns to passenger pigeons, which it always does. One of the few times I saw him laugh was when I asked whether de-extinction might turn out to be impossible. He reminded me that it has already happened. More than 10 years ago, a team that included Alberto Fernández-Arias (now a Revive & Restore adviser) resurrected a bucardo, a subspecies of mountain goat also known as the Pyrenean ibex, that went extinct in 2000. The last surviving bucardo was a 13-year-old female named Celia. Before she died — her skull was crushed by a falling tree — Fernández-Arias extracted skin scrapings from one of her ears and froze them in liquid nitrogen. Using the same cloning technology that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, the team used Celia’s DNA to create embryos that were implanted in the wombs of 57 goats. One of the does successfully brought her egg to term on July 30, 2003. “To our knowledge,” wrote the scientists, “this is the first animal born from an extinct subspecies.” But it didn’t live long. After struggling to breathe for several minutes, the kid choked to death.
There is more here, interesting throughout. One risk is that these newly recreated animals may turn out to be efficient carriers of modern diseases. And the economic benefits of recreating extinct species are…? And here is a legal perspective:
In “How to Permit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should be protected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a genetically modified organism. He concludes that revived species, “as products of human ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.
And are they really the same animals after all, given the imperfections in the process of cloning and recreation? The philosopher might say this:
“I would like to have an elephant that likes the cold weather,” he told me. “Whether you call it a ‘mammoth’ or not, I don’t care.”
I say we would be wise to exercise option value on this one, but of course the incentives of scientists are to do something first.
Have stuff delivered to your car
In a ground-breaking technology move for the automotive industry, Volvo Cars demonstrates the world’s first delivery of food to the car – a new form of ‘roam delivery’ services. The service will allow consumers to have their shopping delivered straight to their car, no matter where they are. Volvo’s new digital keys technology means that car owners will be able to choose their car as a delivery option when ordering goods online. Via a smartphone or a tablet, the owner will be informed when a delivery company wants to drop off or pick up something from the car.
Having accepted the delivery, he or she then hands out a digital key and can track when the car is opened and then locked again. Once the pick-up or drop-off is completed, the digital key ceases to exist.
For the pointer I thank Samir Varma.
My review of Diane Coyle and Zachary Karabell
That is published in The Washington Post, and I can recommend both books. Coyle’s book is GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History and Karabell’s is The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World. My opening sentences are this:
‘May my children grow up in a world where no one knows who the central banker is” is a wise saying. One also can hope for a world where arguments about measuring GDP (gross domestic product, the sum total of the goods and services produced within a nation) or the inflation rate are rare. In good economic times, we tend to take reported economic numbers for granted, but more recently, conspiracy theories have run wild.
On Coyle:
If you are going to read only one book on GDP, Diane Coyle’s “GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History” should be it. More important, you should read a book on GDP, as many of the political debates of our time revolve around this concept. Can we afford our current path of entitlement spending? Was the Obama fiscal stimulus worth it? When will China overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy?
The answers all depend on GDP. In 140 pages of snappy text, Coyle lays out what GDP numbers measure, what roles they play in economic policymaking and forecasting, and how GDP numbers can sometimes mislead us, albeit not in the way many current critics suggest.
With Karabell I have a quibble:
I do not agree with Karabell’s claim that “Bhutan is now routinely described as one of the happiest nations in the world.” The prime minister of Bhutan, Tshering Tobgay, has moved away from talk of “Gross National Happiness,” perhaps because he has realized that his country has relatively little of it. Most of the population is engaged in subsistence farming and has only a minimal chance of performing rewarding or creative labor. The prime minister instead wishes to focus on concrete goals such as “a motorized rototiller for every village and a utility vehicle for each district.” For all the talk of being content with less, external debt has soared to 90 percent of GDP. If anything, Bhutan may show that measures of GDP get at happiness more clearly than does focusing on happiness more directly. Just look at where immigrants wish to move — it is almost always wealthier countries.
Read the whole thing.