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Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Tall Tales in the New York Times - 0 views

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Data News media bias Nature Disaster Insurance

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • , it is still amazing to see the newspaper of record publish a statement like the following about Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurance companies: Munich Re is already tailoring its offerings to a world of more extreme weather. It is a matter of financial survival: In 2008, heavy snows in China resulted in the collapse of 223,000 homes, according to Chinese government statistics, including $1 billion in insured lossesMunich Re's financial survival? Here Rosenthal makes a leap well beyond the perhaps understandable following along with the delusions of crowds. There are always risks to bringing data to bear on an enjoyable tale tall, but let's look anyway at what is actually going on in Munich Re's business over the past several years.
  • Here is what Muinch Re reported on its 2008 company performance, the year in which China suffered the heavy snows: Notwithstanding the most severe financial crisis for generations, Munich Re recorded a clear profit for the financial year 2008, in line with previous announcements. According to preliminary calculations, the consolidated profit amounted to €1.5bn.How about 2009 then? Nikolaus von Bomhard, Chairman of the Board of Management: “We have brought the financial year 2009 to a successful close: with a profit of over €2.5bn, we were even able to surpass expectations and achieve our long-term return target despite the difficult environment.” Sure, 2010 must have see some evidence of a threat to the company's financial survival?  Guess again: On the basis of preliminary estimates, Munich Re achieved a consolidated result of €2.43bn for 2010 (previous year: €2.56bn), despite substantial major losses. The profit for the fourth quarter totalled €0.48bn (0.78bn). Shareholders are to participate in last year's success through another increase in the dividend: subject to approval by the Supervisory Board and the Annual General Meeting, the dividend will rise by 50 cents to €6.25 (5.75) per share. In addition, Munich Re has announced a further share buy-back programme: shares with a volume of up to €500m are to be repurchased before the Annual General Meeting in 2012
  • The NYT may be unaware of the fact that not only is Munich Re in the catastrophe reinsurance business, meaning that it pays out variable and large claims for disasters, but that its business actually depends upon those disasters
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  • Munich Re explains in the context of recent disasters (emphasis added): Overall, pressure on prices in most lines of business and regions is persisting. Munich Re therefore consistently withdrew from under-rated business. It nevertheless proved possible to expand accounts with individual major clients, so that the business volume grew slightly on balance, despite the difficult environment. Munich Re owes this profitable growth especially to its ability to swiftly offer complex, tailor-made reinsurance solutions to its clients. Besides this, the many large losses resulting from natural hazards and also from man-made events, had a stabilising influence on the lines of business and regions affected. Thus, prices increased markedly for natural catastrophe covers in Australia/New Zealand (Oceania) and in offshore energy business. There were no major changes in conditions in this renewal season. The overall outcome of the reinsurance treaty renewals at 1 January 2011 was again very satisfactory for Munich Re.
  • There is downward pressure on prices in the reinsurance industry because there have not been enough disasters to keep up demand and thus premium prices. The following observation was made just three months ago: Insurance and reinsurance prices have been falling across most business lines for two years, reflecting intense competition between well-capitalised insurers and a comparative dearth of major catastrophe-induced losses.
  • as Munch Re explains, they have been able to overcome the dearth of disasters because recent extreme events have allowed them to increase prices on coverage in a manner that not only counteracts recent losses to some degree, but even allows for "profitable growth."  As with most tall tales, the one about the financial plight of reinsurers dealing with a changed climate isn't going away any time soon. It is just another bit of  popular unreality that effective decision making will have to overcome.
Weiye Loh

Religion: Faith in science : Nature News - 0 views

www.nature.com/...470323a.html

Science Religion Faith Funding Academic Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?
  • With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.
  • however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.
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  • But other researchers, both with and without Templeton grants, say that they find the foundation remarkably open and non-dogmatic. "The Templeton Foundation has never in my experience pressured, suggested or hinted at any kind of ideological slant," says Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, a magazine that debunks pseudoscience, who was hired by the foundation to edit an essay series entitled 'Does science make belief in God obsolete?'
  • The debate highlights some of the challenges facing the Templeton Foundation after the death of its founder in July 2008, at the age of 95.
  • With the help of a $528-million bequest from Templeton, the foundation has been radically reframing its research programme. As part of that effort, it is reducing its emphasis on religion to make its programmes more palatable to the broader scientific community. Like many of his generation, Templeton was a great believer in progress, learning, initiative and the power of human imagination — not to mention the free-enterprise system that allowed him, a middle-class boy from Winchester, Tennessee, to earn billions of dollars on Wall Street. The foundation accordingly allocates 40% of its annual grants to programmes with names such as 'character development', 'freedom and free enterprise' and 'exceptional cognitive talent and genius'.
  • Unlike most of his peers, however, Templeton thought that the principles of progress should also apply to religion. He described himself as "an enthusiastic Christian" — but was also open to learning from Hinduism, Islam and other religious traditions. Why, he wondered, couldn't religious ideas be open to the type of constructive competition that had produced so many advances in science and the free market?
  • That question sparked Templeton's mission to make religion "just as progressive as medicine or astronomy".
  • Early Templeton prizes had nothing to do with science: the first went to the Catholic missionary Mother Theresa of Calcutta in 1973.
  • By the 1980s, however, Templeton had begun to realize that fields such as neuroscience, psychology and physics could advance understanding of topics that are usually considered spiritual matters — among them forgiveness, morality and even the nature of reality. So he started to appoint scientists to the prize panel, and in 1985 the award went to a research scientist for the first time: Alister Hardy, a marine biologist who also investigated religious experience. Since then, scientists have won with increasing frequency.
  • "There's a distinct feeling in the research community that Templeton just gives the award to the most senior scientist they can find who's willing to say something nice about religion," says Harold Kroto, a chemist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who was co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and describes himself as a devout atheist.
  • Yet Templeton saw scientists as allies. They had what he called "the humble approach" to knowledge, as opposed to the dogmatic approach. "Almost every scientist will agree that they know so little and they need to learn," he once said.
  • Templeton wasn't interested in funding mainstream research, says Barnaby Marsh, the foundation's executive vice-president. Templeton wanted to explore areas — such as kindness and hatred — that were not well known and did not attract major funding agencies. Marsh says Templeton wondered, "Why is it that some conflicts go on for centuries, yet some groups are able to move on?"
  • Templeton's interests gave the resulting list of grants a certain New Age quality (See Table 1). For example, in 1999 the foundation gave $4.6 million for forgiveness research at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and in 2001 it donated $8.2 million to create an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (that is, altruism and compassion) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "A lot of money wasted on nonsensical ideas," says Kroto. Worse, says Coyne, these projects are profoundly corrupting to science, because the money tempts researchers into wasting time and effort on topics that aren't worth it. If someone is willing to sell out for a million dollars, he says, "Templeton is there to oblige him".
  • At the same time, says Marsh, the 'dean of value investing', as Templeton was known on Wall Street, had no intention of wasting his money on junk science or unanswerables such as whether God exists. So before pursuing a scientific topic he would ask his staff to get an assessment from appropriate scholars — a practice that soon evolved into a peer-review process drawing on experts from across the scientific community.
  • Because Templeton didn't like bureaucracy, adds Marsh, the foundation outsourced much of its peer review and grant giving. In 1996, for example, it gave $5.3 million to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, to fund efforts that work with evangelical groups to find common ground on issues such as the environment, and to get more science into seminary curricula. In 2006, Templeton gave $8.8 million towards the creation of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which funds research on the origins of the Universe and other fundamental issues in physics, under the leadership of Anthony Aguirre, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
  • But external peer review hasn't always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics. Those awards became a major embarrassment in late 2005, during a highly publicized court fight over the teaching of intelligent design in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. A number of media accounts of the intelligent design movement described the Templeton Foundation as a major supporter — a charge that Charles Harper, then senior vice-president, was at pains to deny.
  • Some foundation officials were initially intrigued by intelligent design, Harper told The New York Times. But disillusionment set in — and Templeton funding stopped — when it became clear that the theory was part of a political movement from the Christian right wing, not science. Today, the foundation website explicitly warns intelligent-design researchers not to bother submitting proposals: they will not be considered.
  • Avowedly antireligious scientists such as Coyne and Kroto see the intelligent-design imbroglio as a symptom of their fundamental complaint that religion and science should not mix at all. "Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
  • Foundation officials insist that this is backwards: questioning is their reason for being. Religious dogma is what they are fighting. That does seem to be the experience of many scientists who have taken Templeton money. During the launch of FQXi, says Aguirre, "Max and I were very suspicious at first. So we said, 'We'll try this out, and the minute something smells, we'll cut and run.' It never happened. The grants we've given have not been connected with religion in any way, and they seem perfectly happy about that."
  • John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, also had concerns when he started a Templeton-funded project in 2007. He had just published a paper with survey data showing that religious affiliation had a negative correlation with health among African-Americans — the opposite of what he assumed the foundation wanted to hear. He was bracing for a protest when someone told him to look at the foundation's website. They had displayed his finding on the front page. "That made me relax a bit," says Cacioppo.
  • Yet, even scientists who give the foundation high marks for openness often find it hard to shake their unease. Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is willing to participate in Templeton-funded events — but worries about the foundation's emphasis on research into 'spiritual' matters. "The act of doing science means that you accept a purely material explanation of the Universe, that no spiritual dimension is required," he says.
  • It hasn't helped that Jack Templeton is much more politically and religiously conservative than his father was. The foundation shows no obvious rightwards trend in its grant-giving and other activities since John Templeton's death — and it is barred from supporting political activities by its legal status as a not-for-profit corporation. Still, many scientists find it hard to trust an organization whose president has used his personal fortune to support right-leaning candidates and causes such as the 2008 ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage in California.
  • Scientists' discomfort with the foundation is probably inevitable in the current political climate, says Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The past 30 years have seen the growing power of the Christian religious right in the United States, the rise of radical Islam around the world, and religiously motivated terrorist attacks such as those in the United States on 11 September 2001. Given all that, says Atran, many scientists find it almost impossible to think of religion as anything but fundamentalism at war with reason.
  • the foundation has embraced the theme of 'science and the big questions' — an open-ended list that includes topics such as 'Does the Universe have a purpose?'
  • Towards the end of Templeton's life, says Marsh, he became increasingly concerned that this reaction was getting in the way of the foundation's mission: that the word 'religion' was alienating too many good scientists.
  • The peer-review and grant-making system has also been revamped: whereas in the past the foundation ran an informal mix of projects generated by Templeton and outside grant seekers, the system is now organized around an annual list of explicit funding priorities.
  • The foundation is still a work in progress, says Jack Templeton — and it always will be. "My father believed," he says, "we were all called to be part of an ongoing creative process. He was always trying to make people think differently." "And he always said, 'If you're still doing today what you tried to do two years ago, then you're not making progress.'" 
Weiye Loh

Rethinking the gene » Scienceline - 0 views

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Genetic News Newspaper Latour Chance Probability

shared by Weiye Loh on 23 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Currently, the public views genes primarily as self-contained packets of information that come from parents and are distinct from the environment. “The popular notion of the gene is an attractive idea—it’s so magical,” said Mark Blumberg, a developmental biologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. But it ignores the growing scientific understanding of how genes and local environments interplay, he said.
  • With the rise of molecular biology in the 1930s and genomics (the study of entire genomes) in the 1970s, scientists have developed a much more dynamic and complex picture of this interplay. The simplistic notion of the gene has been replaced with gene-environment interactions and developmental influences—nature and nurture as completely intertwined.
  • But the public hasn’t quite kept up. There remains a “huge chasm” between the way scientists understand genetics and the way the public understands it, said David Shenk, an author who has written extensively on genetics and intelligence.
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  • the public still thinks of genes as blueprints, providing precise instructions for each individual.
  • “The elegant simplicity of the idea is so powerful,” said Shenk. Unfortunately, it is also false. The blueprint metaphor is fundamentally deceptive, he said, and “leads people to believe that any difference they see can be tied back to specific genes.”
  • Instead, Shenk advocates the metaphor of a giant mixing board, in which genes are a multitude of knobs and switches that get turned on and off depending on various factors in their environment. Interaction is key, though it goes against how most people see genetics: the classic, but inaccurate, dichotomies of nature versus nurture, innate versus acquired and genes versus environment.
  • Belief in those dichotomies is hard to eliminate because people tend to understand genetics through the two separate “tracks” of genes and the environment, according to speech communication expert Celeste Condit from the University of Georgia in Athens. Condit suggests that, whenever possible, explanations of genetics—by scientists, authors, journalists, or doctors—should draw connections between the two tracks, effectively merging them into one. “We need to link up the gene and environment tracks,” she said, “so that [people] can’t think of one without thinking of the other.”
  • Part of what makes these concepts so difficult lies in the language of genetics itself. A recent study by Condit in the September issue of Clinical Genetics found that when people hear the word genetics, they primarily think of heredity, or the quality of being heritable (passed from one generation to the next). Unfortunately, the terms heredity and heritable are often confused with heritability, which has a very different meaning.
  • heritability has single-handedly muddled the discourse of genetics to such a degree that even experts can’t keep it straight, argues historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in her recent book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. Keller describes how heritability (in the technical literature) refers to how much of the variation in a trait is due to genetic explanation. But the term has seeped out into the general public and is, understandably, taken to mean heritable, or ability to be inherited. These concepts are fundamentally different, but often hard to grasp.
  • For example, let’s say that in a population with people of different heights, 60 percent of the variation in height is attributable to genes (as opposed to nutrition). The heritability of height is 60 percent. This does not mean, however, that 60 percent of an individual’s height comes from her genes, and 40 percent from what she ate growing up. Heritability refers to causes of variations (between people), not to causes of traits themselves (in each particular individual). The conflation of crucially different terms like traits and variations has wreaked havoc on the public understanding of genetics.
  • The stakes are high. Condit emphasizes how important a solid understanding of genetics is for making health decisions. Whether people see diabetes or lung cancer as determined by family history or responsive to changes in behavior depends greatly on how they understand genetics. Policy decisions about education, childcare, or the workplace are all informed by a proper understanding of the dynamic interplay of genes and the environment, and this means looking beyond the Mendelian lens of heredity. According to Shenk, everyone in the business of communicating these issues “needs to bend over backwards to help people understand.”
Weiye Loh

Mike Adams Remains True to Form « Alternative Medicine « Health « Skeptic North - 0 views

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Homeopathy Science Medicine Health News

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The 10:23 demonstrations and the CBC Marketplace coverage have elicited fascinating case studies in CAM professionalism. Rather than offering any new information or evidence about homeopathy itself, some homeopaths have spuriously accused skeptical groups of being malicious Big Pharma shills.
  • Mike Adams of the Natural News website
  • has decided to provide his own coverage of the 10:23 campaign
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  • Mike’s thesis is essentially: Silly skeptics, it’s impossible to OD on homeopathy!
  • 1. “Notice that they never consume their own medicines in large doses? Chemotherapy? Statin drugs? Blood thinners? They wouldn’t dare drink those.
  • Of course we wouldn’t. Steven Novella rightly points out that, though Mike thinks he’s being clever here, he’s actually demonstrating a lack of understanding for what the 10:23 campaign is about by using a straw man. Mike later issues a challenge for skeptics to drink their favourite medicines while he drinks homeopathy. Since no one will agree to that for the reasons explained above, he can claim some sort of victory — hence his smugness. But no one is saying that drugs aren’t harmful.
  • The difference between medicine and poison is in the dose. The vitamins and herbs promoted by the CAM industry are just as potentially harmful as any pharmaceutical drug, given enough of it. Would Adams be willing to OD on the vitamins or herbal remedies that he sells?
  • Even Adams’ favorite panacea, vitamin D, is toxic if you take enough of it (just ask Gary Null). Notice how skeptics don’t consume those either, because that is not the point they’re making.
  • The point of these demonstrations is that homeopathy has nothing in it, has no measurable physiological effects, and does not do what is advertised on the package.
  • 2. “Homeopathy, you see, isn’t a drug. It’s not a chemical.” Well, he’s got that right. “You know the drugs are kicking in when you start getting worse. Toxicity and conventional medicine go hand in hand.” [emphasis his]
  • Here I have to wonder if Adams knows any people with diabetes, AIDS, or any other illness that used to mean a death sentence before the significant medical advances of the 20th century that we now take for granted. So far he seems to be a firm believer in the false dichotomy that drugs are bad and natural products are good, regardless of what’s in them or how they’re used (as we know, natural products can have biologically active substances and effectively act as impure drugs – but leave it to Adams not to get bogged down with details). There is nothing to support the assertion that conventional medicine is nothing but toxic symptom-inducers.
  • 3-11. “But homeopathy isn’t a chemical. It’s a resonance. A vibration, or a harmony. It’s the restructuring of water to resonate with the particular energy of a plant or substance. We can get into the physics of it in a subsequent article, but for now it’s easy to recognize that even from a conventional physics point of view, liquid water has tremendous energy, and it’s constantly in motion, not just at the molecular level but also at the level of its subatomic particles and so-called “orbiting electrons” which aren’t even orbiting in the first place. Electrons are vibrations and not physical objects.” [emphasis his]
  • This is Star Trek-like technobabble – lots of sciency words
  • if something — anything — has an effect, then that effect is measurable by definition. Either something works or it doesn’t, regardless of mechanism. In any case, I’d like to see the well-documented series of research that conclusively proves this supposed mechanism. Actually, I’d like to see any credible research at all. I know what the answer will be to that: science can’t detect this yet. Well if you agree with that statement, reader, ask yourself this: then how does Adams know? Where did he get this information? Without evidence, he is guessing, and what is that really worth?
  • 13. “But getting back to water and vibrations, which isn’t magic but rather vibrational physics, you can’t overdose on a harmony. If you have one violin playing a note in your room, and you add ten more violins — or a hundred more — it’s all still the same harmony (with all its complex higher frequencies, too). There’s no toxicity to it.” [emphasis his]
  • Homeopathy has standard dosing regimes (they’re all the same), but there is no “dose” to speak of: the ingredients have usually been diluted out to nothing. But Adams is also saying that homeopathy doesn’t work by dose at all, it works by the properties of “resonance” and “vibration”. Then why any dosing regimen? To maintain the resonance? How is this resonance measured? How long does the “resonance” last? Why does it wear off? Why does he think televisions can inactivate homeopathy? (I think I might know the answer to that last one, as electronic interference is a handy excuse for inefficacy.)
  • “These skeptics just want to kill themselves… and they wouldn’t mind taking a few of you along with them, too. Hence their promotion of vaccines, pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy and water fluoridation. We’ll title the video, “SKEPTICS COMMIT MASS SUICIDE BY DRINKING PHARMACEUTICALS AS IF THEY WERE KOOL-AID.” Jonestown, anyone?”
  • “Do you notice the irony here? The only medicines they’re willing to consume in large doses in public are homeopathic remedies! They won’t dare consume large quantities of the medicines they all say YOU should be taking! (The pharma drugs.)” [emphasis his]
  • what Adams seems to have missed is that the skeptics have no intention of killing themselves, so his bizarre claims that the 10:23 participants are psychopathic, self-loathing, and suicidal makes not even a little bit of sense. Skeptics know they aren’t going to die with these demonstrations, because homeopathy has no active ingredients and no evidence of efficacy.
  • The inventor of homeopathy himself, Samuel Hahnemann believed that excessive doses of homeopathy could be harmful (see sections 275 and 276 of his Organon). Homeopaths are pros at retconning their own field to fit in with Hahnemann’s original ideas (inventing new mechanisms, such as water memory and resonance, in the face of germ theory). So how does Adams reconcile this claim?
Weiye Loh

New Study Shows EMF Effect On Brain - So What? « Health « Skeptic North - 0 views

www.skepticnorth.com/...ect-on-brain-%e2%80%93-so-what

Science Health Mobile Wi-Fi

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • In the past 6 months, Skeptic North has run several articles about WiFi, cell phones and the purported health effects that radio-frequency electro-magnetic fields (RF-EMF) may or may not have on the brain and body.  Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the controversy remains to be a popular story in the media, perhaps because of the ubiquitous nature of cellular technology and the popular meme of the hidden dangers of modern life.
  • over the news this week were reports of a new study purporting to show a link between cell phone EMF radiation and increased brain metabolism.  The study was conducted by a well-respected group of NIH researchers conducting tests at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US.  The study is available in abstract for free here, but you have to pay to have access to the full text version.  Reporters all over network news told a simplified story of the paper by Volkow et al, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and drew conclusions outside the scope of the study, inflaming an already overly effulgent debate.
  •  I and others have continued to insist that there is no good evidence of any effect by the microwave radiation emitted by cell phones, cell towers and other electronics on the brain and other body systems, let alone that this radiation causes cancer or other serious illnesses.  The syndrome referred to as electro-hypersensitivity remains un-proved and unfounded, but it seems like there is new evidence that shows that the normal levels of radiation emitted by a cell phone can effect neuronal cells in the brain.
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11
     
    This study is what it is: another thread in the fine woven cloth of our knowledge of nature. It is not a panacea, nor does it refute any evidence that there is or is not a risk of health effects from cell phone use, nor does it show a mechanism of how EMF could alter biological systems. Anybody who purports that it does is basing this conclusion on ideology, not science.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Bringing it Home - 0 views

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Journalism Science Climate Science Disaster

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Writing at MIT's Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Charles Petit breathlessly announces to journalists that the scientific community has now given a green light to blaming contemporary disasters on the emissions of greenhouse gases
  • We recently published a paper showing that the media overall has done an excellent job on its reporting of scientific projections of sea level rise. I suspect that a similar analysis of the issue of disasters and climate change would not result in such favorable results. Of course, looking at the cover of Nature above, it might be understandable why this would be the case.
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11
     
    An official shift may just have occurred not only in news coverage of climate change, but the way that careful scientists  talk about it. Till now blaming specific storms on climate change has been frowned upon. And it still is, if one is speaking of an isolated event. But something very much like blaming global warming for what is happening today, right now, outside the window has just gotten endorsement on the cover of Nature. Its photo of a flooded European village has splashed across it, "THE HUMAN FACTOR." Extreme rains in many regions, it tells the scientific community, is not merely consistent with what to expect from global warming,  but herald its arrival. This is a good deal more immediate than saying, as people have for some time, that glaciers are shrinking and seas are rising due to the effects of greenhouse gases. This brings it home.
Weiye Loh

homunculus: I can see clearly now - 0 views

philipball.blogspot.com/...i-can-see-clearly-now.html

Instrument Microscope Science Latour History Images Representation

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Here’s a little piece I wrote for Nature news. To truly appreciate this stuff you need to take a look at the slideshow. There will be a great deal more on early microscopy in my next book, probably called Curiosity and scheduled for next year.
  • The first microscopes were a lot better than they are given credit for. That’s the claim of microscopist Brian Ford, based at Cambridge University and a specialist in the history and development of these instruments.
  • Ford says it is often suggested that the microscopes used by the earliest pioneers in the seventeenth century, such as Robert Hooke and Antony van Leeuwenhoek, gave only very blurred images of structures such as cells and micro-organisms. Hooke was the first to record cells, seen in thin slices of cork, while Leeuwenhoek described tiny ‘animalcules’, invisible to the naked eye, in rain water in 1676. The implication is that these breakthroughs in microscopic biology involved more than a little guesswork and invention. But Ford has looked again at the capabilities of some of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes, and says ‘the results were breathtaking’. ‘The images were comparable with those you would obtain from a modern light microscope’, he adds in an account of his experiments in Microscopy and Analysis [1].
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  • The poor impression of the seventeenth-century instruments, says Ford, is due to bad technique in modern reconstructions. In contrast to the hazy images shown in some museums and television documentaries, careful attention to such factors as lighting can produce micrographs of startling clarity using original microscopes or modern replicas.
  • Ford was able to make some of these improvements when he was granted access to one of Leeuwenhoek’s original microscopes owned by the Utrecht University Museum in the Netherlands. Leeuwenhoek made his own instruments, which had only a single lens made from a tiny bead of glass mounted in a metal frame. These simple microscopes were harder to make and to use than the more familiar two-lens compound microscope, but offered greater resolution.
  • Hooke popularized microscopy in his 1665 masterpiece Micrographia, which included stunning engravings of fleas, mites and the compound eyes of flies. The diarist Samuel Pepys judged it ‘the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life’. Ford’s findings show that Hooke was not, as some have imagined, embellishing his drawings from imagination, but should genuinely have been able to see such things as the tiny hairs on the flea’s legs.
  • Even Hooke was temporarily foxed, however, when he was given the duty of reproducing the results described by Leeuwenhoek, a linen merchant of Delft, in a letter to the Royal Society. It took him over a year before he could see these animalcules, whereupon he wrote that ‘I was very much surprised at this so wonderful a spectacle, having never seen any living creature comparable to these for smallness.’ ‘The abilities of those pioneer microscopists were so much greater than has been recognized’ says Ford. He attributes this misconception to the fact that ‘no longer is microscopy properly taught.’
  • Reference1. Ford, B. J. Microsc. Anal. March 2011 (in press).
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Mar 11
     
    The first microscopes were a lot better than they are given credit for.
Weiye Loh

Biomimicry: How Scientists Emulate Nature to Create Sustainable Designs | The Utopianis... - 0 views

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Biology Biomimetics Biomimicry Human

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • “The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best adapted organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to harness energy like a leaf, grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, self-medicate like a chimp, create color like a peacock, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.”
  • A more recent example of biomimetics in action is a biological laser created by two physicists at Harvard Medical School. Malte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun placed a single cell, genetically engineered to produce green fluorescent proteins originally found in jellyfish, into a cavity with two parallel mirrors on either side. When they exposed the cell to pulses of light, it emitted green fluorescent light that focused into a laser beam with the aid of the parallel mirrors. As Gather and Yun pointed out in their paper, the single-cell biological laser avoids the use of “artificial or engineered optical gain materials, such as doped crystals, semiconductors, synthetic dyes and purified gases.”
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Jun 11
     
    if one of our goals as a species is longevity, we may want to humble ourselves and take a look at how other species manage to live symbiotically with the earth instead of just on it. Biomimetics, or biomimicry, does just that.
Weiye Loh

The Black Swan of Cairo | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...the-black-swan-of-cairo

Complex System Black Swan Falsifiability Politics Economics

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 May 11 - No Cached
  • It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability "tail risks" to disappear from policymakers' fields of observation.
  • Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.
  • Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Just as a robust economic system is one that encourages early failures (the concepts of "fail small" and "fail fast"), the U.S. government should stop supporting dictatorial regimes for the sake of pseudostability and instead allow political noise to rise to the surface. Making an economy robust in the face of business swings requires allowing risk to be visible; the same is true in politics.
  • Both the recent financial crisis and the current political crisis in the Middle East are grounded in the rise of complexity, interdependence, and unpredictability. Policymakers in the United Kingdom and the United States have long promoted policies aimed at eliminating fluctuation -- no more booms and busts in the economy, no more "Iranian surprises" in foreign policy. These policies have almost always produced undesirable outcomes. For example, the U.S. banking system became very fragile following a succession of progressively larger bailouts and government interventions, particularly after the 1983 rescue of major banks (ironically, by the same Reagan administration that trumpeted free markets). In the United States, promoting these bad policies has been a bipartisan effort throughout. Republicans have been good at fragilizing large corporations through bailouts, and Democrats have been good at fragilizing the government. At the same time, the financial system as a whole exhibited little volatility; it kept getting weaker while providing policymakers with the illusion of stability, illustrated most notably when Ben Bernanke, who was then a member of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, declared the era of "the great moderation" in 2004.
  • Washington stabilized the market with bailouts and by allowing certain companies to grow "too big to fail." Because policymakers believed it was better to do something than to do nothing, they felt obligated to heal the economy rather than wait and see if it healed on its own.
  • The foreign policy equivalent is to support the incumbent no matter what. And just as banks took wild risks thanks to Greenspan's implicit insurance policy, client governments such as Hosni Mubarak's in Egypt for years engaged in overt plunder thanks to similarly reliable U.S. support.
  • Those who seek to prevent volatility on the grounds that any and all bumps in the road must be avoided paradoxically increase the probability that a tail risk will cause a major explosion.
  • In the realm of economics, price controls are designed to constrain volatility on the grounds that stable prices are a good thing. But although these controls might work in some rare situations, the long-term effect of any such system is an eventual and extremely costly blowup whose cleanup costs can far exceed the benefits accrued. The risks of a dictatorship, no matter how seemingly stable, are no different, in the long run, from those of an artificially controlled price.
  • Such attempts to institutionally engineer the world come in two types: those that conform to the world as it is and those that attempt to reform the world. The nature of humans, quite reasonably, is to intervene in an effort to alter their world and the outcomes it produces. But government interventions are laden with unintended -- and unforeseen -- consequences, particularly in complex systems, so humans must work with nature by tolerating systems that absorb human imperfections rather than seek to change them.
  • What is needed is a system that can prevent the harm done to citizens by the dishonesty of business elites; the limited competence of forecasters, economists, and statisticians; and the imperfections of regulation, not one that aims to eliminate these flaws. Humans must try to resist the illusion of control: just as foreign policy should be intelligence-proof (it should minimize its reliance on the competence of information-gathering organizations and the predictions of "experts" in what are inherently unpredictable domains), the economy should be regulator-proof, given that some regulations simply make the system itself more fragile. Due to the complexity of markets, intricate regulations simply serve to generate fees for lawyers and profits for sophisticated derivatives traders who can build complicated financial products that skirt those regulations.
  • The life of a turkey before Thanksgiving is illustrative: the turkey is fed for 1,000 days and every day seems to confirm that the farmer cares for it -- until the last day, when confidence is maximal. The "turkey problem" occurs when a naive analysis of stability is derived from the absence of past variations. Likewise, confidence in stability was maximal at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007.
  • The turkey problem for humans is the result of mistaking one environment for another. Humans simultaneously inhabit two systems: the linear and the complex. The linear domain is characterized by its predictability and the low degree of interaction among its components, which allows the use of mathematical methods that make forecasts reliable. In complex systems, there is an absence of visible causal links between the elements, masking a high degree of interdependence and extremely low predictability. Nonlinear elements are also present, such as those commonly known, and generally misunderstood, as "tipping points." Imagine someone who keeps adding sand to a sand pile without any visible consequence, until suddenly the entire pile crumbles. It would be foolish to blame the collapse on the last grain of sand rather than the structure of the pile, but that is what people do consistently, and that is the policy error.
  • Engineering, architecture, astronomy, most of physics, and much of common science are linear domains. The complex domain is the realm of the social world, epidemics, and economics. Crucially, the linear domain delivers mild variations without large shocks, whereas the complex domain delivers massive jumps and gaps. Complex systems are misunderstood, mostly because humans' sophistication, obtained over the history of human knowledge in the linear domain, does not transfer properly to the complex domain. Humans can predict a solar eclipse and the trajectory of a space vessel, but not the stock market or Egyptian political events. All man-made complex systems have commonalities and even universalities. Sadly, deceptive calm (followed by Black Swan surprises) seems to be one of those properties.
  • The system is responsible, not the components. But after the financial crisis of 2007-8, many people thought that predicting the subprime meltdown would have helped. It would not have, since it was a symptom of the crisis, not its underlying cause. Likewise, Obama's blaming "bad intelligence" for his administration's failure to predict the crisis in Egypt is symptomatic of both the misunderstanding of complex systems and the bad policies involved.
  • Obama's mistake illustrates the illusion of local causal chains -- that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect. The final episode of the upheaval in Egypt was unpredictable for all observers, especially those involved. As such, blaming the CIA is as foolish as funding it to forecast such events. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
  • Political and economic "tail events" are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.
  • Most explanations being offered for the current turmoil in the Middle East follow the "catalysts as causes" confusion. The riots in Tunisia and Egypt were initially attributed to rising commodity prices, not to stifling and unpopular dictatorships. But Bahrain and Libya are countries with high gdps that can afford to import grain and other commodities. Again, the focus is wrong even if the logic is comforting. It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied -- what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the terrain are studied rather than those of a single element of the terrain.
  • When dealing with a system that is inherently unpredictable, what should be done? Differentiating between two types of countries is useful. In the first, changes in government do not lead to meaningful differences in political outcomes (since political tensions are out in the open). In the second type, changes in government lead to both drastic and deeply unpredictable changes.
  • Humans fear randomness -- a healthy ancestral trait inherited from a different environment. Whereas in the past, which was a more linear world, this trait enhanced fitness and increased chances of survival, it can have the reverse effect in today's complex world, making volatility take the shape of nasty Black Swans hiding behind deceptive periods of "great moderation." This is not to say that any and all volatility should be embraced. Insurance should not be banned, for example.
  • But alongside the "catalysts as causes" confusion sit two mental biases: the illusion of control and the action bias (the illusion that doing something is always better than doing nothing). This leads to the desire to impose man-made solutions
  • Variation is information. When there is no variation, there is no information. This explains the CIA's failure to predict the Egyptian revolution and, a generation before, the Iranian Revolution -- in both cases, the revolutionaries themselves did not have a clear idea of their relative strength with respect to the regime they were hoping to topple. So rather than subsidize and praise as a "force for stability" every tin-pot potentate on the planet, the U.S. government should encourage countries to let information flow upward through the transparency that comes with political agitation. It should not fear fluctuations per se, since allowing them to be in the open, as Italy and Lebanon both show in different ways, creates the stability of small jumps.
  • As Seneca wrote in De clementia, "Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all . . . just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches." The imposition of peace through repeated punishment lies at the heart of many seemingly intractable conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. Furthermore, dealing with seemingly reliable high-level officials rather than the people themselves prevents any peace treaty signed from being robust. The Romans were wise enough to know that only a free man under Roman law could be trusted to engage in a contract; by extension, only a free people can be trusted to abide by a treaty. Treaties that are negotiated with the consent of a broad swath of the populations on both sides of a conflict tend to survive. Just as no central bank is powerful enough to dictate stability, no superpower can be powerful enough to guarantee solid peace alone.
  • As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, "A little bit of agitation gives motivation to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace so much as freedom." With freedom comes some unpredictable fluctuation. This is one of life's packages: there is no freedom without noise -- and no stability without volatility.∂
Weiye Loh

The Great Beyond: Lab sabotage deemed research misconduct (with exclusive surveillance ... - 0 views

blogs.nature.com/...otage_deemed_research_m_1.html

Academic Research Sabotage Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, issued a finding of research misconduct for Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, debarring him for three years from involvement in US federally funded research and from serving as an advisor to the US Public Health Service. The federal register carried the note today. Bhrigu, now in India, was caught on videotape sabotaging the experiments of a graduate student in his lab at the univeristy last year. And today, Nature releases exclusive surveillance tapes, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in Michigan.
  • Video: This video, obtained by Nature via the Freedom of Information Act, shows Vipul Bhrigu carrying a spray bottle full of ethanol into the refrigerator where Heather Ames had stored her cell culture media and contaminating her reagents.
Weiye Loh

Google is funding a new software project that will automate writing local news - Recode - 0 views

www.recode.net/...ate-writing-local-news-stories

News Natural Language Artificial Intelligence AI Google

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Jul 17
     
    "Radar aims to automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement - basically roboticizing the work of reporters. Stories from the data will be penned using Natural Language Generation, which converts information gleaned from the data into words. The robotic reporters won't be working alone. The grant includes funds allocated to hire five journalists to identify datasets, as well as curate and edit the news articles generated from Radar. The project also aims to create automated ways to add images and video to robot-made stories."
Weiye Loh

Washington's Blog: Facebook Censors Prominent Political Critics « naked capit... - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ominent-political-critics.html

Facebook Censorship Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Dec 12
     
    "Indeed, Facebook told an Infowars reporter last year not to post anything political: Be careful making about making political statements on facebook … facebook is about building relationships not a platform for your political viewpoint. Don't antagonize your base. Be careful and congnizat (sic) of what you are preaching. And Infowars also confirms that the Facebook account for Natural News - one of the most popular alternative health sites - has been shut down. Reports are that the Facebook accounts of a number of other political critics were suspended or deactivated today as well, including:"
Weiye Loh

Everything is a Remix Part 4 on Vimeo - 0 views

vimeo.com/36881035

Creativity Law Regulation Remix Culture

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Feb 12
     
    Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they're interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Why are textbooks so expensive? - 0 views

www.skepticblog.org/...why-are-textbooks-so-expensive

Books Education Recycling ebooks

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • As an author, I’ve seen how the sales histories of textbooks work. Typically they have a big spike of sales for the first 1-2 years after they are introduced, and that’s when most the new copies are sold and most of the publisher’s money is made. But by year 3  (and sometimes sooner), the sales plunge and within another year or two, the sales are miniscule. The publishers have only a few options in a situation like this. One option: they can price the book so that the first two years’ worth of sales will pay their costs back before the used copies wipe out their market, which is the major reason new copies cost so much. Another option (especially with high-volume introductory textbooks) is to revise it within 2-3 years after the previous edition, so the new edition will drive all the used copies off the shelves for another two years or so. This is also a common strategy. For my most popular books, the publisher expected me to be working on a new edition almost as soon as the previous edition came out, and 2-3 years later, the new edition (with a distinctive new cover, and sometimes with significant new content as well) starts the sales curve cycle all over again. One of my books is in its eighth edition, but there are introductory textbooks that are in the 15th or 20th edition.
  • For over 20 years now, I’ve heard all sorts of prophets saying that paper textbooks are dead, and predicting that all textbooks would be electronic within a few years. Year after year, I  hear this prediction—and paper textbooks continue to sell just fine, thank you.  Certainly, electronic editions of mass market best-sellers, novels and mysteries (usually cheaply produced with few illustrations) seem to do fine as Kindle editions or eBooks, and that market is well established. But electronic textbooks have never taken off, at least in science textbooks, despite numerous attempts to make them work. Watching students study, I have a few thoughts as to why this is: Students seem to feel that they haven’t “studied” unless they’ve covered their textbook with yellow highlighter markings. Although there are electronic equivalents of the highlighter marker pen, most of today’s students seem to prefer physically marking on a real paper book. Textbooks (especially science books) are heavy with color photographs and other images that don’t often look good on a tiny screen, don’t print out on ordinary paper well, but raise the price of the book. Even an eBook is going to be a lot more expensive with lots of images compared to a mass-market book with no art whatsoever. I’ve watched my students study, and they like the flexibility of being able to use their book just about anywhere—in bright light outdoors away from a power supply especially. Although eBooks are getting better, most still have screens that are hard to read in bright light, and eventually their battery will run out, whether you’re near a power supply or not. Finally, if  you drop your eBook or get it wet, you have a disaster. A textbook won’t even be dented by hard usage, and unless it’s totally soaked and cannot be dried, it does a lot better when wet than any electronic book.
  • A recent study found that digital textbooks were no panacea after all. Only one-third of the students said they were comfortable reading e-textbooks, and three-fourths preferred a paper textbook to an e-textbook if the costs were equal. And the costs have hidden jokers in the deck: e-textbooks may seem cheaper, but they tend to have built-in expiration dates and cannot be resold, so they may be priced below paper textbooks but end up costing about the same. E-textbooks are not that much cheaper for publishers, either, since the writing, editing, art manuscript, promotion, etc., all cost the publisher the same whether the final book is in paper or electronic. The only cost difference is printing and binding and shipping and storage vs. creating the electronic version.
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Jun 12
     
    But in the 1980s and 1990s, the market changed drastically with the expansion of used book recyclers. They set up shop at the bookstore door near the end of the semester and bought students' new copies for pennies on the dollar. They would show up in my office uninvited and ask if I want to sell any of the free adopter's copies that I get from publishers trying to entice me. If you walk through any campus bookstore, nearly all the new copies have been replaced by used copies, usually very tattered and with broken spines. The students naturally gravitate to the cheaper used books (and some prefer them because they like it if a previous owner has highlighted the important stuff). In many bookstores, there are no new copies at all, or just a few that go unsold. What these bargain hunters don't realize is that every used copy purchased means a new copy unsold. Used copies pay nothing to the publisher (or the author, either), so to recoup their costs, publishers must price their new copies to offset the loss of sales by used copies. And so the vicious circle begins-publisher raises the price on the book again, more students buy used copies, so a new copy keeps climbing in price.
Weiye Loh

Does patent/ copyright stifle or promote innovation? - 6 views

From a Critical Ethic perspective, Who do patents and copyrights protect? What kind of ideologies underly such a policy? I would argue that it is the capitalist ideologies, individualist ideolo...

MS Word patent copyright

started by Weiye Loh on 20 Aug 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 20 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

Libertarianism Is Marxism of the Right - 4 views

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t21933.html "Because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hil...

Libertarianism Marxism

started by Weiye Loh on 28 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

CancerGuide: The Median Isn't the Message - 0 views

cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html

Statistics Science Cancer

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Statistics recognizes different measures of an "average," or central tendency. The mean is our usual concept of an overall average - add up the items and divide them by the number of sharers
  • The median, a different measure of central tendency, is the half-way point.
  • A politician in power might say with pride, "The mean income of our citizens is $15,000 per year." The leader of the opposition might retort, "But half our citizens make less than $10,000 per year." Both are right, but neither cites a statistic with impassive objectivity. The first invokes a mean, the second a median. (Means are higher than medians in such cases because one millionaire may outweigh hundreds of poor people in setting a mean; but he can balance only one mendicant in calculating a median).
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The larger issue that creates a common distrust or contempt for statistics is more troubling. Many people make an unfortunate and invalid separation between heart and mind, or feeling and intellect. In some contemporary traditions, abetted by attitudes stereotypically centered on Southern California, feelings are exalted as more "real" and the only proper basis for action - if it feels good, do it - while intellect gets short shrift as a hang-up of outmoded elitism. Statistics, in this absurd dichotomy, often become the symbol of the enemy. As Hilaire Belloc wrote, "Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death."
  • This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturant and life-giving. It declares holy war on the downgrading of intellect by telling a small story about the utility of dry, academic knowledge about science. Heart and head are focal points of one body, one personality.
  • We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities," and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.
  • But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation. When I learned about the eight-month median, my first intellectual reaction was: fine, half the people will live longer; now what are my chances of being in that half. I read for a furious and nervous hour and concluded, with relief: damned good. I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair.
  • Another technical point then added even more solace. I immediately recognized that the distribution of variation about the eight-month median would almost surely be what statisticians call "right skewed." (In a symmetrical distribution, the profile of variation to the left of the central tendency is a mirror image of variation to the right. In skewed distributions, variation to one side of the central tendency is more stretched out - left skewed if extended to the left, right skewed if stretched out to the right.) The distribution of variation had to be right skewed, I reasoned. After all, the left of the distribution contains an irrevocable lower boundary of zero (since mesothelioma can only be identified at death or before). Thus, there isn't much room for the distribution's lower (or left) half - it must be scrunched up between zero and eight months. But the upper (or right) half can extend out for years and years, even if nobody ultimately survives. The distribution must be right skewed, and I needed to know how long the extended tail ran - for I had already concluded that my favorable profile made me a good candidate for that part of the curve.
  • The distribution was indeed, strongly right skewed, with a long tail (however small) that extended for several years above the eight month median. I saw no reason why I shouldn't be in that small tail, and I breathed a very long sigh of relief. My technical knowledge had helped. I had read the graph correctly. I had asked the right question and found the answers. I had obtained, in all probability, the most precious of all possible gifts in the circumstances - substantial time.
  • One final point about statistical distributions. They apply only to a prescribed set of circumstances - in this case to survival with mesothelioma under conventional modes of treatment. If circumstances change, the distribution may alter. I was placed on an experimental protocol of treatment and, if fortune holds, will be in the first cohort of a new distribution with high median and a right tail extending to death by natural causes at advanced old age.
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Aug 10
     
    The Median Isn't the Message by Stephen Jay Gould
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: Anthony Grayling on Atheism - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...thony-grayling-on-atheism.html

Religion Philosophy Agnosticism Secularism Morality Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • if you think that the reasons you have for thinking that there are fairies are very poor reasons. That it's irrational to think that there are such things, then belief in supernatural agencies in general is irrational... [Agnostics] fall foul of this picture...
  • we're all familiar with Popper's dictum that if a theory, a claim explains everything, if everything is consistent with the truth of the claim, then it's empty. It doesn't explain anything at all. [On the claim that Science purports to explain everything, or that it claims that it will be able to eventually] I don't think Science does claim that at all, in fact. Science at its normal best: it is a public, a testable, a challengeable project. Always having to maintain its own respectability by saying what would count as counter-evidence against it. And when people put forward views in Science, they publish them so that other people can test them, review them, try to replicate results, and I think that is absolutely the model of how an epistemology should proceed. Out there in the open and inviting the very toughest kind of response from other people...
  • [On the claim that there is no morality without God] In classical antiquity, in the Classical Tradition, there are deep, rich, powerful thoughts about the nature of morality, the foundations of ethics. The nature of the good life, which make no appeal whatever to any divine command. Or any government via this sort of spirit monarch in disguise, who will reward you if you do what he or she requires, and punish you if you don't. All the very best and deepest thinking about ethics has come from non-religious traditions...
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Jul 10
     
    Anthony Grayling on Atheism "Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Weiye Loh

When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...udgments-masquerade-as-science

Economics Science Bias

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Most people think of the term in the context of production of goods and services: more efficient means more valuable output is wrung from a given bundle of real resources (which is good) or that fewer real resources are burned up to produce a given output (which is also good).
  • In economics, efficiency is also used to evaluate alternative distributions of an available set of goods and services among members of society. In this context, I distinguished in last week’s post between changes in public policies (reallocations of economic welfare) that make some people feel better off and none feel worse off and those that make some people feel better off but others feel worse off.
  • consider whether economists should ever become advocates for a revaluation of China’s currency, the renminbi — or, alternatively, for imposing higher tariffs on Chinese imports. Such a policy would tend to improve the lot of shareholders and employees of manufacturers competing with Chinese imports. Yet it would make American consumers of Chinese goods worse off. If the renminbi were significantly and artificially undervalued against the United States dollar, relative to a free-market exchange rate without government intervention, that would be tantamount to China running a giant, perennial sale on Chinese goods sold to the United States. If you’re an American consumer, what’s not to like about that? So why are so many economists advocating an end to this sale?
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Strict constructionists argue that their analyses should confine themselves strictly to positive (that is, descriptive) analysis: identify who wins and who loses from a public policy, and how much, but leave judgments about the social merits of the policy to politicians.
  • a researcher’s political ideology or vested interest in a particular theory can still enter even ostensibly descriptive analysis by the data set chosen for the research; the mathematical transformations of raw data and the exclusion of so-called outlier data; the specific form of the mathematical equations posited for estimation; the estimation method used; the number of retrials in estimation to get what strikes the researcher as “plausible” results, and the manner in which final research findings are presented. This is so even among natural scientists discussing global warming. As the late medical journalist Victor Cohn once quoted a scientist, “I would not have seen it if I did not believe it.”
  • anyone who sincerely believes that seemingly scientific, positive research in the sciences — especially the social sciences — is invariably free of the researcher’s own predilections is a Panglossian optimist.
  • majority of economists have been unhappy for more than a century with the limits that the strict constructionist school would place upon their professional purview. They routinely do enter the forum in which public policy is debated
  • The problem with welfare analysis is not so much that ethical dimensions typically enter into it, but that economists pretend that is not so. They do so by justifying their normative dicta with appeal to the seemly scientific but actually value-laden concept of efficiency.
  • economics is not a science that only describes, measures, explains and predicts human interests, values and policies — it also evaluates, promotes, endorses or rejects them. The predicament of economics and all other social sciences consists in their failure to acknowledge honestly their value orientation in their pathetic and inauthentic pretension to emulate the natural sciences they presume to be value free.
  • By the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, a public policy is judged to enhance economic efficiency and overall social welfare — and therefore is to be recommended by economists to decision-makers — if those who gain from the policy could potentially bribe those who lose from it into accepting it and still be better off (Kaldor), or those who lose from it were unable to bribe the gainers into forgoing the policy (Hicks). That the bribe was not paid merely underscores the point.
  • In applications, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and the efficiency criterion amount to the same thing. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $5, social gains increase by $5, so the policy is a good one. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $15, there is a deadweight loss of $5, so the policy is bad. Evidently, on the Kaldor-Hicks criterion one need not know who Jack and Jill are, nor anything about their economic circumstances. Furthermore, a truly stunning implication of the criterion is that if a public policy takes $X away from one citizen and gives it to another, and nothing else changes, then such a policy is welfare neutral. Would any non-economist buy that proposition?
  • Virtually all modern textbooks in economics base their treatment of efficiency on Kaldor-Hicks, usually without acknowledging the ethical dimensions of the concept. I use these texts in my economics courses as, I suppose, do most my colleagues around the world. But I explicitly alert my students to the ethical pitfalls in normative welfare economics, with commentaries such as “How Economists Bastardized Benthamite Utilitarianism” and “The Welfare Economics of Health Insurance,” or with assignments that force students to think about this issue. My advice to students and readers is: When you hear us economists wax eloquent on the virtue of greater efficiency — beware!
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Aug 10
     
    When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » The Value of Vertigo - 1 views

skepticblog.org/...the-value-of-vertigo

Kuhn Creationism

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Sep 10 - Cached
  • But Ruse’s moment of vertigo is not as surprising as it may appear. Indeed, he put effort into achieving this immersion: “I am atypical, I took about three hours to go through [the creation museum] but judging from my students most people don’t read the material as obsessively as I and take about an hour.” Why make this meticulous effort, when he could have dismissed creationism’s well-known scientific problems from the parking lot, or from his easy chair at home?
  • According to Ruse, the vertiginous “what if?” feeling has a practical value. After all, it’s easy to find problems with a pseudoscientific belief; what’s harder is understanding how and why other people believe. “It is silly just to dismiss this stuff as false,” Ruse argues (although it is false, and although Ruse has fought against “this stuff” for decades). “A lot of people believe Creationism so we on the other side need to get a feeling not just for the ideas but for the psychology too.”
  • Weiye Loh on 03 Sep 10
     
    In June of 2009, philosopher of biology Michael Ruse took a group of grad students to the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky (and also some mainstream institutions) as part of a course on how museums present science. In a critical description of his visit, Ruse reflected upon "the extent to which the Creationist museum uses modern science to its own ends, melding it in seamlessly with its own Creationist message." Continental drift, the Big Bang, and even natural selection are all presented as evidence in support of Young Earth cosmology and flood geology. While immersing himself in the museum's pitch, Ruse wrote, Just for one moment about half way through the exhibit…I got that Kuhnian flash that it could all be true - it was only a flash (rather like thinking that Freudianism is true or that the Republicans are right on anything whatsoever) but it was interesting nevertheless to get a sense of how much sense this whole display and paradigm can make to people.
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