Quotulatiousness

November 30, 2011

Is “innovation” today’s buzzword equivalent of “excellence”

Filed under: Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

Stephen Gordon thinks that the term “innovation” is well on the way to being just another way of saying “corporate handout”:

The theory of economic growth includes roles for such well-defined concepts as investment, human capital, research and development, productivity, and technical progress. I don’t know where innovation fits into this. My guess would have been that innovation is another name for R&D, but apparently there’s an ineffable distinction between innovation and R&D.

There are well-known policy instruments at the government’s disposal for increasing investment in human and physical capital and for increasing R&D activities. (Their relative effectiveness is another question.) But so far, the only proposals I’ve seen for an innovation policy consist of programs in which governments give money to deserving firms. This is problematic on a couple fronts.

Firstly, there are already many — too many — ‘economic development’ programs whose purpose is to channel public money to companies that enjoy the favour of the government. It’s hard to believe we need more of them.

November 25, 2011

“[Fill-in-the-blank] is now a clear and present danger”

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Andrew Orlowski explains how we keep falling for junk science through media exposure:

Firstly. An obscure researcher or scientist will make a dramatic claim.

The media picks up on this, and a reporter is assigned to the story. The reporter will have no scientific background — but looks to the state and the bureaucracy to do something. Anything.

The hapless minister is then hauled on to explain the inaction. He will be intelligent — he is likely to have a PPE from Oxford, like the presenter — but no specialist knowledge. He, too, trusts the scientists.

A pledge is then made to increase funding for the scientist who makes the claim.

A pledge is also made to act — by introducing legislation or other regulations. Perhaps a task force or committee will also be involved:


Illustrations: Andy Davies

The bandwagon is now rolling.

November 22, 2011

The biggest threat to the environmental movement

Filed under: Economics, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

No, it’s not some ferociously polluting corporation, or a dangerously powerful conservative politician or a candidate for the GOP nomination in the United States. It’s algae:

“We can engineer, humbly, like we have been domesticating plants for a long time,” one scientist told me. “We engineer the algae to do biochemically something quite different to what they’d be doing in the wild: they still take photons from the sun, and via biology, turn it into a useful captured molecule. We have them doing something similar but with stunning efficiency: it’s 40 to 100 times more efficient,” says Elbert Branscomb, chief scientist to the US Department of Energy.

There are (at least) around 60 startups hoping to produce oil and diesel biologically, with accelerated fermentation or photosynthesis techniques to produce an end product that is 100 per cent compatible with the existing infrastructure. Some, for example, tweak the algae to make them do photosynthesis anything from 40 to 100 times more efficiently. LS9 received $30m in funding and has a one-step process to convert sugar to create renewable petrol. It expects production within five years. If oil prices remain high, say over $40 or $50 a barrel, then it’s viable.

So why is this the biggest threat to the environmental movement?

But the greatest challenge cheap hydrocarbons poses is for people whose outlook is founded on what I call “End Times logic”. The most successful political movement in recent years is environmentalism, which expanded from specific concerns about pollution and conservation into an all-encompassing worldview, complete with very preachy appeals to changing parts of our lifestyles.

These ranged from “Don’t flush the loo too often”, to “Don’t fly for a weekend break”, to “Eat less red meat”. Very few politicians have felt courageous enough to contradict this. And the movement has achieved its ascendancy through urgent, apocalyptic appeals, rather than using calmer methods of rational persuasion which involve costs and benefits to be totted up. These new energy sources pose a profound problem: they saves the planet, and we carry on with minimum disruption.

I expect that one effect will be that environmentalism will become much more about everyday concerns such as pollution, and conservations again, back to where it started. But it grew into a vacuum, after the end of the Cold War, when great political ideas seemed to lose credibility. As a way of driving the political agenda, it will become currency without value. Buzzwords such as “sustainability”, founded on a resource-constrained view, will no longer be credible. People will simply laugh at them.

October 1, 2011

The inspirational power of science fiction

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Neal Stephenson on the ability of science fiction to inspire:

In early 2011, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance — even utility — in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.

2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs — simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex. A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare’s nest of email threads and Powerpoints. The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a Politburo. Letting them work toward an agreed-on goal is something more like a free and largely self-coordinated market of ideas.

July 18, 2011

Good news for (some) soldiers

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:15

David Pugliese reports on the US Army’s work on a new, significantly lighter, Squad Automatic Weapon:

“We are using cased telescoped ammunition which uses a strong plastic case instead of a traditional brass case,” said Kori Phillips, a systems management engineer with ARDEC.

Weight reduction for the weapon was achieved by designing the new weapon platform using the latest materials technologies as well as modeling and simulation to achieve minimal weight without compromising performance.

With a basic load of 1,000 rounds, the LSAT light machine gun and its cased telescoped ammunition is 20.4 pounds lighter than a traditional SAW with the same amount of standard, brass-cased ammunition.

[. . .]

“The cased telescoped ammo still provides the same muzzle velocity, range and accuracy as the brass-cased ammo,” Phillips said. “We’re not sacrificing lethality for weight. The plastic case does the same job.”

In addition to significant weight savings, the LSAT is designed to provide other advantages over the current SAW. With a rotating chamber design, the cased telescoped light machine gun improves reliability.

“We’ve avoided the common problem of failure to feed and failure to eject,” Phillips said. “In the current SAW system, that’s one of the places where you primarily have failures and malfunctions.”

Of course, if the new ammunition works well for the SAW, it’ll certainly be adapted for other small arms (in a hot combat zone, you never have “too much” ammunition available, but you often have “too little”).

July 6, 2011

Perhaps they should call themselves the Canadian Fundraising Society?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:21

As it appears that they only have a sideline in cancer research these days:

An Ontario cancer researcher is concerned that the Canadian Cancer Society has proportionally shifted funding away from research and is spending more of its dollars on fundraising and administration costs.

“Most scientists don’t realize that the budget has been going up and up, and donations have been growing, but the budget for research has been shrinking,” said Brian Lichty, a researcher at McMaster University who is looking into treating cancer with viruses that kill tumours. “So they are surprised and disappointed when they find out that this is the case, and the trend.”

CBC’s Marketplace analyzed the Canadian Cancer Society’s financial reports dating back a dozen years. It discovered that each year, as the society raised more dollars, the proportion of money it spent on research dropped dramatically — from 40.3 per cent in 2000 to under 22 per cent in 2011.

The amount of money spent on research has increased slightly over the years, but as a portion of the Cancer Society’s growing budget, it’s almost been cut in half.

May 26, 2011

More on resveratrol in red wine

Filed under: Health, Science, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 15:04

Every few weeks, there’s another study result published (or, in some cases, mangled in the publishing) about the benefits to human health from the resveratrol in red wine, but few of them will go this far:

Drink 8 bottles of wine, you’ll be unharmed if hit by Mike Tyson
True medical fact: Trials with boxers underway

Top boffins in Texas believe they will soon provide solid proof of an astonishingly useful biological fact: that if you drink eight bottles of red wine you can be punched in the head by a professional heavyweight boxer and it will do you no harm at all.

We’re paraphrasing slightly, of course.

March 12, 2011

Drinking is good for you, but we still don’t know why it’s good for you

Filed under: Health, Science, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:17

Moderate drinking (defined as 2-3 drinks per day) is proven to be healthy for most people, but the jury is still out on why it’s good for you:

Scientists say that more research needs to be done to understand why alcohol may be beneficial in small doses. Most commonly, evidence shows that alcohol is associated with increased cardiovascular health. Researchers at the University of Calgary recently analyzed data on alcohol consumption and heart disease and determined that those who drink one to two glasses of alcohol per day are up to 25% less likely to develop heart disease.

The team, lead by Dr. William Ghali, found that moderate drinking led to higher levels of “good” cholesterol and a decrease of a chemical responsible for blood clotting. It doesn’t matter if the booze is from Chateau Mouton-Rothschild or Labatt’s; “it does appear to be alcohol itself that is causing these favourable outcomes,” Dr. Ghali, a professor of medicine at the university, said.

February 25, 2011

In search of a grand, unifying theory of . . . porn?

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Two different studies came to my attention dealing with people and pornography. (No, before you ask, the studies were not illustrated, and the pages didn’t stick together.) First up, Professors Martin Barker and Feona Attwood, and Dr Clarissa Smith tried to find out how individuals use porn:

The aim of this survey, available online at pornresearch.org, is to collect evidence around the everyday uses of pornography and find out how the people who use it feel it fits into their lives. Ultimately, the data may be used to challenge some of the assumptions now current in debate around the “sexualisation” of society.

Critics of the research have questioned whether such work is necessary, claiming that “everyone knows how porn is used”. Those behind the survey, Professors Martin Barker and Feona Attwood, and Dr Clarissa Smith, reader in sexual culture at the University of Sunderland, reckon that the real problem is that we don’t have the answers, and society is attempting to legislate in a vacuum.

While not denying the moral dimension of many of the questions, the researchers are concerned that the voices of users and enjoyers will be swamped by a prevailing critical assumption that the only issues worth considering are how problematic porn use is, or how it might affect children. The researchers believe that there can be many different and complicated reasons for looking at pornography and that not all the materials that go under that label are the same, only to be distinguished by how ‘extreme’ or ‘explicit’ they are.

Dr Smith told the Reg: “Although there is much speculation and plenty of academic work which insists on porn having demonstrable and problem ‘effects’ on users, I’ve been struck by how often researchers have told me there is no need for any empirical research on how and why porn is consumed.

You can imagine how studies like this would be resisted by other researchers who didn’t think of them first who might decry the work as being trivial and unnecessary.

On the other side of the Atlantic, researchers were more interested in the interaction between political events and the consumption of pornography:

Both Republicans and Democrats seek out internet porn to celebrate the victories of their candidates says a new study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. The abstract from the article with the toe-curling social science title, “Pornography-seeking behaviors following midterm political elections in the United States: A replication of the challenge hypothesis” reports:

The current study examined a prediction derived from the challenge hypothesis; individuals who viciously win a competition of rank order will seek out pornography relatively more often than individuals who viciously lose a competition. By examining Google keyword searches during the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections in the United States, the relative popularity of various pornography keyword searches was computed for each state and the District of Columbia the week after each midterm election. Consistent with previous research examining presidential elections and the challenge hypothesis, individuals located in traditionally Republican states tended to search for pornography keywords relatively more often after the 2010 midterm election (a Republican victory) than after the 2006 midterm election (a Democratic victory). Conversely, individuals located in traditionally Democratic states tended to search for pornography relatively less often following the 2010 midterm election than they did following the 2006 midterm election.

February 19, 2011

“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

An interesting look at the epic battle between the perfectionist urge and the first-mover advantage:

There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.

What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.

[. . .]

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

February 7, 2011

QotD: Genomics

Filed under: Health, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:07

There’s been enormous progress in genomics; we’re now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn’t materialized, we now know why it hasn’t materialized, and it’s possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It’s not a blueprint; it’s not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it’s like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.) My bet is that we’re going to have to wait another decade. Then things are going to start to get very strange in medicine.

Charles Stross, “Reasons to be cheerful”, Charlie’s Diary, 2010-12-31

January 28, 2011

US Navy’s “pee antenna”

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Warships have been sprouting more and more antennae for all the various communication equipment on board — more every year, as new devices are rolled out of development and into active service. This creates problems, especially with smaller vessels, as the multiple antennae need to be spaced far enough apart to avoid mutual interference with signals. The US Navy may have come up with a liquid solution:

With an $80 water pump, a $15 rubber hose and a $20 electrical device called a current probe that was easily plugged into a hand-held radio, [Daniel Tam] produced a spout roughly four metres tall from the waters of San Diego Bay. With this he could send and receive a clear signal. Over the intervening years his invention, dubbed the “pee antenna” by incredulous colleagues, has been tweaked and improved to the point where it can transmit over a distance of more than 50km (30 miles).

To make a seawater antenna, the current probe (an electrical coil roughly the size and shape of a large doughnut) is attached to a radio’s antenna jack. When salt water is squirted through the hole in the middle of the probe, signals are transferred to the water stream by electromagnetic induction. The aerial can be adjusted to the frequency of those signals by lengthening or shortening the spout. To fashion antennae for short-wave radio, for example, spouts between 18 and 24 metres high are about right. To increase bandwidth, and thus transmit more data, such as a video, all you need do is thicken the spout. And the system is economical. The probe consumes less electricity than three incandescent desk lamps.

A warship’s metal antennae, which often weigh more than 3½ tonnes apiece, can be damaged in storms or combat. Seawater antennae, whose components weigh next to nothing and are easily stowable, could provide handy backups — and, eventually, more than backups. Not all of a ship’s antennae are used at once, so the spouts could be adjusted continuously to obtain the types needed at a given moment. According to SPAWAR, ten such antennae could replace 80 copper ones.

January 25, 2011

The genomic treasure trove of Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:36

Thanks to relatively thorough genealogical records, the people of Quebec are of great and growing interest to genetic researchers:

One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy genealogical records. But even with genealogical records there are often omissions and biases in transmission of information. This is one reason that HAP, Dodecad, and Eurogenes BGA are so interesting: they combine what people already know with scientific genealogy. This intersection can often be very inferentially fruitful.

But what about if you had a whole population with rich robust conventional genealogical records? Combined with the power of the new genomics you could really crank up the level of insight. Where to find these records? A reason that Jewish genetics is so useful and interesting is that there is often a relative dearth of records when it comes to the lineages of American Ashkenazi Jews. Many American Jews even today are often sketchy about the region of the “Old Country” from which their forebears arrived. Jews have been interesting from a genetic perspective because of the relative excess of ethnically distinctive Mendelian disorders within their population. There happens to be another group in North America with the same characteristic: the French Canadians. And importantly, in the French Canadian population you do have copious genealogical records. The origins of this group lay in the 17th and 18th century, and the Roman Catholic Church has often been a punctilious institution when it comes to preserving events under its purview such as baptisms and marriages. The genealogical archives are so robust that last fall a research group input centuries of ancestry for ~2,000 French Canadians, and used it to infer patterns of genetic relationships as a function of geography, as well as long term contribution by provenance.

January 11, 2011

Glass that is “stronger than steel” developed

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:59

Arnie Bruce-Cooper reports on a recent development in high-strength glass:

In the world of materials, strength (the amount of force a substance can withstand) and toughness (its capacity to resist fracturing) are not merely different attributes; they’re very difficult to achieve together. Now a collaboration of researchers from Caltech and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created a form of glass that has both qualities. It’s stronger and tougher than steel or, indeed, any other known material. The material features palladium, a metal whose possible use in glasses was recognized 45 years ago.

[. . .]

The work is outlined in a study published this week in the journal Nature Materials. Marios Demetriou, a professor at Caltech and lead author of the paper, says the work involved finding a particularly strong version of the simplest form of glass, called marginal glass, and then turning it into the even stronger form known as bulk glass.

“What we did here is find a very, very tough marginal glass made of palladium with small fractions of metalloids like phosphorus, silicon, and germanium, which yielded one-millimeter-thick samples. And we just said, let’s add very little of something that will make it bulk without making it brittle,” says Demetriou. By adding 3.5 percent silver to this marginal glass, Demetriou was able to increase the thickness to six millimeters while maintaining its toughness.

H/T to Virginia Postrel for the link.

January 3, 2011

Healthy skepticism about study results

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:30

John Allen Paulos provides some useful mental tools to use when presented with unlikely published findings from various studies:

Ioannidis examined the evidence in 45 well-publicized health studies from major journals appearing between 1990 and 2003. His conclusion: the results of more than one third of these studies were flatly contradicted or significantly weakened by later work.

The same general idea is discussed in “The Truth Wears Off,” an article by Jonah Lehrer that appeared last month in the New Yorker magazine. Lehrer termed the phenomenon the “decline effect,” by which he meant the tendency for replication of scientific results to fail — that is, for the evidence supporting scientific results to seemingly weaken over time, disappear altogether, or even suggest opposite conclusions.

[. . .]

One reason for some of the instances of the decline effect is provided by regression to the mean, the tendency for an extreme value of a random quantity dependent on many variables to be followed by a value closer to the average or mean.

[. . .]

This phenomenon leads to nonsense when people attribute the regression to the mean as the result of something real, rather than to the natural behavior of any randomly varying quantity.

[. . .]

In some instances, another factor contributing to the decline effect is sample size. It’s become common knowledge that polls that survey large groups of people have a smaller margin of error than those that canvass a small number. Not just a poll, but any experiment or measurement that examines a large number of test subjects will have a smaller margin of error than one having fewer subjects.

Not surprisingly, results of experiments and studies with small samples often appear in the literature, and these results frequently suggest that the observed effects are quite large — at one end or the other of the large margin of error. When researchers attempt to demonstrate the effect on a larger sample of subjects, the margin of error is smaller and so the effect size seems to shrink or decline.

[. . .]

Publication bias is, no doubt, also part of the reason for the decline effect. That is to say that seemingly significant experimental results will be published much more readily than those that suggest no experimental effect or only a small one. People, including journal editors, naturally prefer papers announcing or at least suggesting a dramatic breakthrough to those saying, in effect, “Ehh, nothing much here.”

The availability error, the tendency to be unduly influenced by results that, for one reason or another, are more psychologically available to us, is another factor. Results that are especially striking or counterintuitive or consistent with experimenters’ pet theories also more likely will result in publication.

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