Category: Science
The loyal Kalashnikov
Later in life, he disapproved of anyone who he thought had hastened the Soviet Union’s downfall, or who had been unable to control the political and economic turbulence that followed. In memoirs and interviews, he was harshly critical of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin.
To the end he remained loyal to what he called Socialist ideals and the leaders who gave them shape, and seemed untroubled by the hardships endured by his family during the early years of Soviet rule. His family’s land and home had been seized during collectivization, and when he was a child the family was deported into the Siberian wilderness. His father died during their first Siberian winter, and one of his brothers labored for seven years as a prisoner digging the White Sea canal.
Still, General Kalashnikov spoke of his great respect for Lenin and Stalin alike. “I never knew him personally,” he said of Stalin, “and I regret this.”
There is more here. I think of him as one of the last tinkerer-inventors from the mechanical tradition, which stretched through the twentieth century but is becoming increasingly obsolete. Precisely because he was from this tradition, his famed rifle was relatively easy to fix, clean, and maintain, easy to equip with interchangeable spare parts, and thus it was easy to use for killing people in poorer countries with lower levels of the division of labor. There is a good Wikipedia page on the rifle here. He will go down in history as a good example of what was wrong with much of the twentieth century
The politics of science fiction
Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.
That is from Tim Kreider, who praises the political visions and fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson. Kreider also longs for a more political literature, devoted to such ideas as common stewardship of land and water, and also “small co-ops” instead of “vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations.” Among other changes. He then writes:
My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.
What is a good response to that? Let’s look at the article itself, and we can see sentence which is smarter than Kreider himself seems to realize:
If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death.
I would myself note that the politics of science fiction, on average (with exceptions), encourage us to think about “breaking a few eggs,” and not for the better. The reality is that when it comes to the future, we can “see around the corner” only to a limited degree. The upshot is that the rights of the individual — when applicable — should remain paramount, and no I don’t mean Caplanian libertarian rights. You can only rarely be sure you will get such a great gain from violating rights, so why not do the right thing instead? Science fiction inhabits the realm of fiction precisely because the building of grand scenarios is denied to us, for the most part.
To again use Kreider’s own words, societies where “nothing can be taken for granted” are exactly the ones I would never wish to visit, much less live in. I know the radical anarcho-capitalist strand, but is there a Burke-Oakeshott-Hayek science fiction, in the traditionalist and conservative sense of that combination? Or must we resort to the “fantasy” genre to capture such a vision? What would a science fiction account of a macro-level spontaneous order look like? Iain Banks? Frank Herbert?
Does a warm climate discourage economic output?
Geoffrey Heal and Jisung Park have a new paper “Feeling the Heat: Temperature, Physiology & the Wealth of Nations,” here is the abstract:
Does temperature affect economic performance? Has temperature always affected social welfare through its impact on physical and cognitive function? While many studies have explored the indirect links between climate and welfare (e.g. agricultural yield, violent conflict, or sea-level rise), few address the possibility of direct impacts operating through human physiology. This paper presents a model of labor supply under thermal stress, building on a longstanding physiological literature linking thermal stress to health and task performance. A key prediction is that effective labor supply – defined as a composite of labor hours, task performance, and effort – is decreasing in temperature deviations from the biological optimum. We use country-level panel data on population-weighted average temperature and income (1950-2005), to illustrate the potential magnitude of the effect. Using a fixed effects estimation strategy, we find that hotter-than-average years are associated with lower output per capita for already hot countries and higher output per capita for cold countries: approximately 3%-4% in both directions. We then use household data on air conditioning and heating expenditures from the US to provide further evidence in support of a physiologically based causal mechanism. This more direct causal link between climate and social welfare has important implications for both the economics of climate change and comparative development.
The NBER version is here, I do not otherwise see ungated access.
*Addiction by Design*
The author is Natasha Dow Schüll and the subtitle is Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. I read this on the flight back home and it is a good choice for one of the very best books of the year, as well as one of the best books on “behavioral economics” and “nudge.”
Almost every page in this book is instructive. Here is one good passage of many:
…his department noticed nearly three times as many deaths by heart attack occurring in Clark County as in other counties. A closer look revealed that two-thirds of the cardiac arrests took place in casinos and realized that the high rate of death had to do with the delays encountered by paramedic teams negotiating their complicated interiors. Although they arrived at casino properties within four and a half to five minutes of a call, it took them an average of eleven minutes to reach victims inside.
The casinos, by the way, very often do not let the rescue teams come in through the main front door, for fear of putting off their customers.
The very best parts of the book are about the elaborate private sector strategies to milk the clientele for greater yield, and how those desires interact with the very competitive nature of the market:
…the industry has since attempted to strategically steer players…toward the cherry-dribbling, slow-bleeding pole of play, a profit-from-volume formula that one industry member has referred to as the “Costco model of gambling.”
And:
While in the past the typical gambling addict had been an older male who bet on sports or cards for ten years before seeking help, now it was a thirty-five-year-old female with two children who had played video for less than two years before seeking help.
And:
“In my life before gambling, she tells me, “money was almost like a God, I had to have it. But with gambling, money had no value, no significant, it was just this thing — just get me in the zone, that’s all…You lose value, until there’s no value at all. Except the zone — the zone is your God.”
The book’s home page is here, and the author’s home page is here. This is an impressive book. It is also a brilliant study of man-machine interaction and I found it to be a complete page turner.
While we are on the topic, I very recently received a review copy of The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Gambling, edited by Leighton Vaughan Williams and Donald S. Siegel, which appears to be excellent.
Not From the Onion-NROL 39
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched a new spy-satellite, NROL-39, on Dec. 5. When I first saw this I felt sure it couldn’t be real, it must be from The Onion but no, this is the official logo for the satellite which you can see on the rocket and in this NRO press release.
When the history of how the United States became a dystopian, surveillance state is written no one will be able to say that we were not warned.
The rising star system for scientific achievement and collaboration
This is taken from an NBER paper by Ajay Agrawal, John McHale, and Alexander Oettl. Here is the Inside Higher Ed summary:
A study (abstract available here) being released today suggests that it may be coming from a broader range of academic departments, but from a smaller number of elite scientists…
The analysis is based on a look at the top-ranked departments and the top scientists (as judged by output of citation-weighted papers) in evolutionary biology from 1980 through 2000. The research found two apparently contradictory trends:
- The share of citation-weighted publications produced by the top 20 percent of departments fell from approximately 75 percent to 60 percent.
- The share of papers produced by the top 20 percent of individual scientists increased from 70 percent to 80 percent.
In other words, the role of the individual star became more important at a time that the role of the star department (while still significant) fell.
There is not only more collaboration, but collaborations are taking place across a wider range of “quality” of institutions:
And the average distance in rank of institutional departments increased as well. In 1980, it was about 30 (meaning someone at an institution ranked 20th, say, was collaborating with someone at an institution ranked 50th). By 2005, the average rank gap was 55.
I see a common trend at mid-tier universities to care less about the research quality of the average faculty member, and care more about the quality and reputation of the stars, while “marketing” those stars more intensely than before. And there are many more good researchers at lower-tier institutions, but they may not command much of a premium in terms of pay or working conditions. Their specialized knowledge can make them very valuable as co-authors on the right project and so they end up in some high quality collaborations.
The cheerleader effect
Whether you’re a casual user of social media sites like facebook and twitter or an avid online dater accessing eHarmony or Match.com, chances are you’ve created a personal online profile and been faced with a decision: What should you post for your profile picture? Many people post head shots or selfies, while others opt for pictures of their children, spouses, pets, or even favorite quotes or symbols. If your goal is to be perceived as attractive (and let’s be honest, whose isn’t?), then new research by Drew Walker and Edward Vul at the University of California, San Diego suggests your best bet is to opt for a group shot with friends.
A photo with friends conveys the fact that you are amiable and well-liked, but oddly enough that is not what makes you more appealing. Instead, the new research shows that individual faces appear more attractive when presented in a group than when presented alone — a perceptually driven phenomenon known as the cheerleader effect.
And why does this work?:
Walker and Vul posit that the cheerleader effect arises from the interplay of three different visuo-cognitive processes. First, whenever we view a set of objects like an array of dots or a group of faces, our visual system automatically computes general information about the entire set, including average size of group members, theiraverage location, and even the average emotional expression on faces. Thus although the group contains many individual items, we naturally perceive those items as a set, and form our impressions on the basis of the collective whole.
In addition, the impression that we have of the group as a whole influences our perception of any one individual item. We tend to view individual members as being more like the group than they actually are. Thus when we see a face in a crowd, we tend to perceive that face as similar to the average of all the faces in that crowd.
As it turns out, we find average faces very attractive. Composite faces, which are generated by averaging individual faces together, are rated as significantly more attractive than the individual faces used to create them. According to Walker and Vul, if presenting a face in a group causes us to perceive that face as more similar to the average, we are likely to find that face more attractive.
In one experiment, the researchers found that a group of four was large enough to create that effect. Does this have implications for rock and roll?
That is from Cindi May, via Gareth Cook.
The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists
That is a new paper by Chiara Franzoni, Giuseppe Scellato and Paula Stephan, and the abstract is this:
Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.
The university-gated version is here. There are more new immigration papers here, via Kevin Lewis.
By the way, over sixty percent of the scientists and engineers of Silicon Valley were born outside of the United States. By the way, here is a new Swiss paper (pdf) on attitudes toward immigrant foreigners.
Testicle car markets in everything
Many of us testicle owner/operators have often claimed that we’d happily donate our (usually left) testicle for something, usually some kind of car. So it shouldn’t be so shocking to hear that some loon is actually doing just that. One nut for $35,000. Which he’s using to buy a Nissan 370Z.
As much as I’d like to picture the scene where this ashen-faced man stumbles into a Nissan dealership, plonks a jar with a floating, solitary testicle on the counter, and points to a red 370Z before collapsing, the reality is much more orderly.
The man, Mark Parisi, is donating his nut to a medical research organization for a sum of $35,000.
There is more here, noting that the deal may not survive this publicity. Here is more on Mark:
There are other advantages to being a human Guinea pig: He gets free checkups, which can save him around $700.
Parisi estimates he’s saved more than $150,000 over the past two years by participating in other medical studies, including an Ebola virus study that paid $5,000 a week, the Province Journal reported.
For the pointer I thank Skeptical Scalpel and @hswapnil.
My visit to IBM Watson
I very much enjoyed my visit to their excellent Saarinen-designed building, up in Westchester County somewhere. No office has a window but every path you might take from one part of the building to another gives you beautiful full-window views of the surrounding countryside.
I wish to thank all the people who took the time to show me and explain to me what they are up to. Their program suggested that more dairy (milk, not coconut milk) can be blended into Thai recipes with greater gain than you otherwise might think.
I had as a personal guide the man who is the voice of Watson and I told him to go see In a World…
Their cafeteria is excellent and the people in charge understand which recipes transfer well to institutional settings and which do not. Their vegetarian food is delicious and looks delicious, rendering the “nudge” unnecessary. From the rest of the menu, the turkey chili is of special commendation. Google take note, you are falling behind in the culinary department…
IBM’s Watson will be made available in a more powerful form on the internet
Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.
That is a big deal, obviously. The story is here.
Attempting to insure against your own destruction, enslavement, and cultural abnegation
A new finance product has been proposed:
Funding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence with a Lottery Bond
(Submitted on 11 Nov 2013)I propose the establishment of a SETI Lottery Bond to provide a continued source of funding for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The SETI Lottery Bond is a fixed rate perpetual bond with a lottery at maturity, where maturity occurs only upon discovery and confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Investors in the SETI Lottery Bond purchase shares that yield a fixed rate of interest that continues indefinitely until SETI succeeds—at which point a random subset of shares will be awarded a prize from a lottery pool. SETI Lottery Bond shares also are transferable, so that investors can benefact their shares to kin or trade them in secondary markets. The total capital raised this way will provide a fund to be managed by a financial institution, with annual payments from this fund to support SETI research, pay investor interest, and contribute to the lottery fund. Such a plan could generate several to tens of millions of dollars for SETI research each year, which would help to revitalize and expand facilities such as the Allen Telescope Array. The SETI Lottery Bond is a savings product that only can be offered by a financial institution with authorization to engage in banking and gaming activities. I therefore suggest that one or more banks offer a lottery-linked savings product in support of SETI research, with the added benefit of promoting personal savings and intergenerational wealth building among individuals.
The pointer is from Mark Rodeghier.
What do we know about the easing of malaria burdens?
There are some new and interesting results from Lena Huldén, Ross McKitrick and Larry Huldén. Here is the abstract:
Malaria has disappeared in some countries but not others, and an explanation for the eradication pattern has been elusive. We show that the probability of malaria eradication jumps sharply when average household size in a country drops below four persons. Part of the effect commonly attributed to income growth is likely due to declining household size. The effect of DDT usage is difficult to isolate but we only identify a weak role for it. Warmer temperatures are not associated with increased malaria prevalence. We propose that household size matters because malaria is transmitted indoors at night, so the fewer people are sleeping in the same room, the lower the probability of transmission of the parasite to a new victim. We test this hypothesis by contrasting malaria incidence with dengue fever, another mosquito-borne illness spread mainly by daytime outdoor contact.
The gated published version is here. A six-page author summary is here.
For pointers I thank Aaron C. Chmielewski and Gregory Rehmke.
Google patents a throat tattoo with a built-in lie-detecting mobe microphone
Maybe your boss (or spouse?) will want you to wear it:
And then there’s the lie-detector feature. “Optionally,” the filing muses, “the electronic skin tattoo can further include a galvanic skin response detector to detect skin resistance of a user. It is contemplated that a user that may be nervous or engaging in speaking falsehoods may exhibit different galvanic skin response than a more confident, truth telling individual.”
There is more information here. The pointer is from Charles C. Mann.
When will pitch-tracking technology displace baseball umpires?
This is a fascinating article by Ben Lindbergh, and it does not require interest in baseball, here is one bit:
“The goal, of course, is no error, or as close to that ideal as we can possibly come. And so the best solution might be a hybrid approach that combines tradition with technology. Not robot umps, but regular umps with input from robot brains.”
Here is another good bit of many:
Over time, players have internalized some of the idiosyncrasies of the strike zone as it’s currently called. The zone called against left-handed hitters is shifted a couple inches away relative to righties. The size of the zone fluctuates depending on the count — expanding dramatically on 3-0 and shrinking severely on 0-2 — and according to the base-out state, velocity of the pitch, and many other factors. Yes, these are all arguments in support of standardizing the strike zone, assuming you like to see pitches called according to code. They’re also reasons to exercise caution. “Because it’s always worked this way” isn’t a good reason not to do something different, but it is a reason to think through the possible ramifications before making a major change that could upset the delicate batter-pitcher balance. Players will adjust to whatever the zone looks like, but it’s in baseball’s best interests to make those adjustments smooth.
McKean cautions that instituting an automatic zone “would ruin the game,” which makes him the latest in a long line of thus-far-incorrect critics who’ve warned that something would be the end of baseball. “If you told the pitchers to try and throw that ball with an automatic strike zone, which means it has to hit some part of that plate or be in some part of that strike zone, heck, the games would go on for five, six hours,” he says. My guess is that he has the direction of the effect right, but the magnitude wrong. Automating the strike zone would probably make it slightly smaller, on the whole, and more predictable for the hitter. That could increase scoring and perhaps lead to longer games, but not to such an extent that the sport would be broken.
However, standardizing the zone would remove a level of interplay between batter, pitcher, catcher, and umpire that many fans find compelling.
Interesting throughout, and for the pointer I thank Hamp Nettles.