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(p. 20) Jimmy walked into the offices of Chicago Options Associates in 1994 and met the CEO Michael Davis for a job interview. Davis had looked over Wales's academic publication about options pricing.

"It was impressive looking," says Wales wryly about the paper. "It was a very theoretical paper but it wasn't very practical." But Davis was sufficiently intrigued, as he wanted someone like Wales to pore over the firm's financial models and help improve them. So he took on young Wales, who seemed to be sharp and had acumen for numbers. Little did either of them know they would have a long road ahead together, with Wikipedia in the future.

Wales's first job was to go over the firm's current pricing models. "What was really fascinating was that it was truly a step beyond what I'd seen in academia," he recalls. "It was very practical, and didn't have a real theoretical foundation." Wales was intrigued that the firm traded on principles that worked in practice, not in theory. (This is something he would say about his future endeavor Wikipedia.) "Basically they just knew in the marketplace that the existing models were wrong."

Source:

Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

(Note: italics in original.)

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Source of book image: http://kellylowenstein.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/wikipedia-revolution1.jpg

Wikipedia is a very unexpected and disruptive institution. Amateurs have produced an encyclopedia that is bigger, deeper, more up-to-date, and arguably of at least equal accuracy, with the best professional encyclopedias, such as Britannica.

I learned a lot from Lih's book. For instance I did not know that the founders of Wikipedia were admirers of Ayn Rand. And I did not know that the Oxford English Dictionary was constructed mainly by volunteer amateurs.

I also did not know anything about the information technology precursors and the back-history of the institutions that helped Wikipedia to work.

I learned much about the background, values, and choices of Wikipedia entrepreneur "Jimbo" Wales. (Jimbo Wales seems not to be perfect, but on balance to be one of the 'good guys' in the world---one of those entrepreneurs who can be admired for something beyond their particular entrepreneurial innovation.)

Lih's book also does a good job of sketching the problems and tensions within Wikipedia.

I believe that Wikipedia is a key step in the development of faster and better institutions of knowledge generation and communication. I also believe that substantial further improvements can and will be made.

Most importantly, I think that you can only go so far with volunteers--ways must be found to reward and compensate.

In the meantime, much can be learned from Lih. In the next few weeks, I will be quoting a few passages that I found especially illuminating.

Book discussed:

Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

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(p. A25) When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.

That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.

In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.

Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

For the full commentary, see:

PATRICK J. MICHAELS. "OPINION; How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus; The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., DECEMBER 18, 2009): A25.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated DECEMBER 17, 2009.)

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(p. 188) For the next two years, Conway coordinated her efforts under Sutherland at PARC with Mead's ongoing work at Caltech. But she was frustrated with the pace of progress. There was no shortage of innovative design ideas; computerized design tools had advanced dramatically since Mead's first efforts several years before. Yet the industry as a whole continued in the old rut. As Conway put it later, the problem was "How can you take methods that are new, methods that are not in common use and therefore perhaps considered unsound methods, and turn them into sound methods?" [Conway's italics].

She saw the challenge in the terms described in Thomas Kuhn's popular book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. it was the problem that took Boltzmann to his grave. It was the problem of innovation depicted by economist Joseph Schumpeter in his essays on entrepreneurship: new systems lay waste to the systems of the past. Creativity is a solution for the creator and the new ventures he launches. But it wreaks dissolution--"creative destruction," in Schumpeter's words-- for the defenders of old methods. In fact, no matter how persuasive the advocates of change, it is very rare that an entrenched establishment will reform its ways. Establishments die or retire or fall in revolution; they only rarely transform themselves.

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

(Note: italics in original.)

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(p. 182) . . . , Poincaré's elegant math prevailed over Boltzrnann's practical findings. For some thirty years, Boltzmann struggled to get his ideas across. But he failed. He had the word, but he could not find a way to gain its acceptance in the world. For long decades, the establishment held firm.

So in the year 1906, Poincaré became president of the French (p. 183) Académie des Sciences and Boltzmann committed suicide. As Mead debatably puts it, "Boltzmann died because of Poincaré." At least, as Boltzmann's friends attest, this pioneer of the modem era killed himself in an apparent fit of despair, deepened by the widespread official resistance to his views.

He died, however, at the very historic moment when all over Europe physicists were preparing to vindicate the Boltzmann vision. He died just before the findings of Max Planck, largely derived from Boltzmann's probability concepts, finally gained widespread acceptance. He died several months after an obscure twenty-one-year-old student in Geneva named Albert Einstein used his theories in proving the existence of the atom and demonstrating the particle nature of light. In retrospect, Boltzmann can be seen as a near-tragic protagonist in the greatest intellectual drama of the twentieth century: the overthrow of matter.

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. A1) Just two years ago, a United Nations panel that synthesizes the work of hundreds of climatologists around the world called the evidence for global warming "unequivocal."

But as representatives of about 200 nations converge in Copenhagen on Monday to begin talks on a new international climate accord, they do so against a background of renewed attacks on the basic science of climate change.

The debate, set off by the circulation of several thousand files and e-mail messages stolen from one of the world's foremost climate research institutes, has led some who oppose limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and at least one influential country, Saudi Arabia, to question the scientific basis for the Copenhagen talks.

The uproar has threatened to complicate a multiyear diplomatic effort already ensnared in difficult political, technical and financial disputes that have caused leaders to abandon hopes of hammering out a binding international climate treaty this year.

. . .

(p. A8) On dozens of Web sites and blogs, skeptics and foes of greenhouse gas restrictions take daily aim at the scientific arguments for human-driven climate change. The stolen material was quickly seized upon for the questions it raised about the accessibility of raw data to outsiders and whether some data had been manipulated.

An investigation into the stolen files is being conducted by the University of East Anglia, in England, where the computer breach occurred. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has also said he will look into the matter. At the same time, polls in the United States and Britain suggest that the number of people who doubt that global warming is dangerous or caused by humans has grown in recent years.

. . .

Science is about probability, not certainty. And the persisting uncertainties in climate science leave room for argument. What is a realistic estimate of how much temperatures will rise? How severe will the effects be? Are there tipping points beyond which the changes are uncontrollable?

Even climate scientists disagree on many of these questions. But skeptics have been critical of the data assembled to show that warming is occurring and the analytic methods that climate scientists use, including mathematical models used to demonstrate a human cause for warming and project future trends.

Both sides also have at times been criticized for overstatement in characterizing the scientific evidence. The contents of the stolen e-mail messages and documents have given fresh ammunition to the skeptics' camp.

The Climatic Research Unit's role as a central aggregator of temperature and other climate data has also made it a target. One widely discussed file extracted from the unit's computers, presumed to be the log of a researcher named Ian Harris, recorded his years of frustration in trying to make sense of disparate data and described procedures -- or "fudge factors," as he called them -- used by scientists to eliminate known sources of error.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW C. REVKIN and JOHN M. BRODER. "Facing Skeptics, Climate Experts Sure of Peril." The New York Times (Mon., December 7, 2009): A1 & A8.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated Sun., December 6, 2009 and has the title "In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril.")

(Note: ellipses added.)

Note: the online version of the article includes the following, very interesting, correction of the print version:

Correction: December 15, 2009
Because of an editing error, an article on Dec. 7 about the scientific evidence supporting global warming overstated the level of certainty expressed in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a network of scientists, that human-caused warming was under way and, if unabated, would pose rising risks. The panel said that most warming since 1950 was "very likely" caused by humans, not that there was "no doubt." The article also misidentified the temperature data cited by a scientist at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit who had expressed frustration in a log about trying to make sense of disparate data. The data was direct measurements of temperature, not indirect indicators like the study of tree rings.

(Note: italics and bold in original.)

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Source of photo and email images: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

One can imagine Michael Crichton looking down on us with a sad smile:

(p. A3) The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.

The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.

Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.

"This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."

John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville attacked in the emails for asking that an IPCC report include dissenting viewpoints, said, "It's disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested--but rather orchestrated."

In all, more than 1,000 emails and more than 2,000 other documents were stolen Thursday from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K. The identity of the hackers isn't certain, but the files were posted on a Russian file-sharing server late Thursday, and university officials confirmed over the weekend that their computer had been attacked and said the documents appeared to be genuine.

. . .

In one email, Benjamin Santer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., wrote to the director of the climate-study center that he was "tempted to beat" up Mr. Michaels. Mr. Santer couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.

In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.

For the full story, see:

KEITH JOHNSON. "Climate Strife Comes to Light; Emails Illustrate Anger of Scientists Who Believe Humans Are Root of Global Warming." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., NOVEMBER 23, 2009): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the printed version of the article is mostly the same as the online version, but has some differences in order and content. The part quoted above is consistent with the printed version. The passages quoted are the same in both versions, except that the paragraph on the views of John Christy appears later in the online version, and the online version omits his phrase "but rather orchestrated." [I skimmed for differences, but am not absolutely sure that I caught them all.])

(Note: the title of the online version of the article is: "Climate Emails Stoke Debate; Scientists' Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global Warming.")

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A19) Suppose for a minute--. . . --that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

. . .

The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.

Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they're a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful "SuperFreakonomics"--the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller "Freakonomics"--gives Myhrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.

. . .

. . . , Messrs. Levitt and Dubner show every sign of being careful researchers, going so far as to send chapter drafts to their interviewees for comment prior to publication. Nor are they global warming "deniers," insofar as they acknowledge that temperatures have risen by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.

But when it comes to the religion of global warming--the First Commandment of which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion--Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are grievous sinners. They point out that belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined. They note that sea levels will probably not rise much more than 18 inches by 2100, "less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations." They observe that "not only is carbon plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don't necessarily mirror human activity." They quote Mr. Myhrvold as saying that Mr. Gore's doomsday scenarios "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame."

More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another." In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn't the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors

For the full commentary, see:

BRET STEPHENS. "Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics; Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., OCTOBER 27, 2009): A19.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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Source of cartoon: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) Last year, a typical investment portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds lost roughly a fifth of its value. Standard portfolio-construction tools assume that will happen only once every 111 years.

With once-in-a-century floods seemingly occurring every few years, financial-services firms ranging from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to MSCI Inc.'s MSCI Barra are concocting new ways to protect investors from such steep losses. The shift comes from increasing recognition that conventional assumptions about market behavior are off the mark, substantially underestimating risk.

. . .

(p. C9) Many of Wall Street's new tools assume market returns fall along a "fat-tailed" distribution, where, say, last year's nearly 40% stock-market decline would be more common than previously thought.

Fat-tailed distributions are nothing new. Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot recognized their relevance to finance in the 1960s. But they were never widely used in portfolio-building tools, partly because the math was so unwieldy.

For the full story, see:

ELEANOR LAISE. "Some Funds Stop Grading on the Curve." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPTEMBER 8, 2009): C1 & C9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. 324) Disney seems no more real in the growing body of academic critiques of the man and the company that bears his name. Many of these critiques are vaguely if not specifically Marxist in their methodology, and they display the usual Marxist tendency to bulldoze the complexities of human behavior in the pursuit of an all--embracing interpretation of Disney's life and work. What fatally cripples most academic writing about Walt Disney is simple failure to examine its supposed subject. Disney scholarship, like many other kinds of scholarship in today's academy, feeds on itself. The common tendency is for scholars to rush past the facts of Disney's life and career, frequently getting a lot of them wrong, in order to write about what really interests them, which is what other scholars have already written. It is this incestuous quality, even more than such commonly cited sins as a reliance on jargon, that makes so much academic writing, on Disney as on other subjects, claustrophobically difficult to read.



Disney has attracted other writers whose unsupportable claims and speculations sometimes win approval of scholars all too eager to believe the worst of the man. The persistent accusations of anti-Semitism are only the mildest examples of an array whose cumulative effect is to portray a Disney who was, among other vile things, racist, misogynist, imperialist, sexually warped. a spy for J. Edgar Hoover, desperate to conceal his illegitimate Spanish birth, (p. 325) and so terrified of death that he had his body cryogenically frozen. Pathologies are undoubtedly at work here, none of them Disney's.

Source:

Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

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(p. 286) "He is shy with reporters." Edith Efron wrote for TV Guide in 1965. "His eyes are dull and preoccupied, his affability mechanical and heavy-handed. He gabs away slowly and randomly in inarticulate, Midwestern speech that would be appropriate to a rural general store. His shirt is open, his tie crooked. One almost expects to see over-all straps on his shoulders and wisps of hay in his hair. . . . If one has the patience to persist, however, tossing questions like yellow flares into the folksy fog, the fog lifts, a remote twinkle appears in the preoccupied eves, and the man emerges."

Here again, as in other interviews from the 1960s, Disney permitted himself to sound bitter and resentful when he said anything of substance: "These avant-garde artists are adolescents. It's only a little noisy element that's going that way, that's creating this sick art. . . . There is no cynicism in me and there is none allowed in our work. . . . I don't like snobs. You find some of intelligentsia, they become snobs. They think they're above everybody else. They're not. More education doesn't mean more common sense. These ideas they have about art are crazy. . . . I don't care about critics. Critics take themselves too seriously. They think the only way to be noticed and to be the smart guy is to pick and find fault with things. It's the public I'm making pictures for."

Source:

Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

(Note: ellipses and italics in original.)

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Source of book image: http://press.harvardbusiness.org/on/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/verganti_300dpi.jpg.

(p. W8) In "Design-Driven Innovation" (Harvard Business Press, 272 pages, $35), Roberto Verganti holds that product development should be grounded not in the data of survey-takers or the observations of anthropologists but in the judgment of executives. "We have experienced years of hype about user-centered design," he says. But breakthrough innovations, in Mr. Verganti's view, do not represent what customers knew they wanted. Rather, the most profitable innovations are those that create a radically new meaning for a product.

Nintendo's Wii video-game console and its motion-sensing controllers "transformed what a console meant: from an immersion in a virtual world approachable only by niche experts into an active workout, in the real world, for everyone." The Swatch in 1983 introduced a new meaning to the watch: neither an article of fine jewelry nor a utilitarian timekeeping tool but a fashion accessory. Starbucks, he says, changed the meaning of a coffee shop from a place to buy coffee to a home away from home.

For the full review, see:

DAVID A. PRICE. "The Shape of Things to Come; Design is more than aesthetics and ease of use. It's a way of doing business." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 9, 2009): W8.

Reference for book under review:

Brown, Tim. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: HarperBusiness Publishers, 2009.

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(p. A21) Several years ago I grew concerned about my postmenopausal mother's risk of osteoporosis. I tried to convince her to initiate hormone replacement therapy. She didn't listen to me. Instead, she spoke with her gynecologist, who--contrary to best medical evidence at the time--recommended against such treatment. I would eventually be thankful my mother listened to the gynecologist who had known her for decades instead of me and the published medical reviews I was relying on. Some years later my mother was diagnosed with early breast cancer. Had she been on estrogen replacement, it is likely that her tumor would have progressed more rapidly. The gynecologist likely saved my mother's life.

Studies published in the medical literature are mostly produced by academics who face an imperative to publish or watch their careers perish. These academics aren't basing their careers on their clinical skills and experiences. Paradoxically, if we allow the academic literature to set guidelines for accepted practices, we are allowing those who are often academics first and clinicians second to determine what clinical care is appropriate.

Consciously or not, those who provide the peer review for medical journals are influenced by whether the work they are reviewing will impact their standing in the medical community. This is a dilemma. The experts who serve as reviewers compete with the work they are reviewing. Leaders in every community, therefore, exert disproportional influence on what gets published. We expect reviewers to be objective and free of conflicts, but in truth, only rarely is that the case.

Albert Einstein once noted that "a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth."

For the full commentary, see:

NORBERT GLEICHER. "'Expert Panels' Won't Improve Health Care; Government reliance on medical studies will make it harder to discard false prophecies and dogmas." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 19, 2009): A21.

(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated Sun., Oct. 18.)

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"The unusual suspects, 1969: top row from left, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam; bottom row from left, Terry Jones, John Cleese and Michael Palin." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 24) "A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious," Mr. Palin said. "It's almost documentary, like 'The Office.' That's a very funny show, but you're looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun."

He added: "I'm proud to be a Python. It's a badge of silliness, which is quite important. I was the gay lumberjack, I was the Spanish Inquisition, I was one-half of the fish-slapping dance. I look at myself and think that may be the most important thing I've ever done."

Mr. Cleese and Mr. Jones, in rare agreement, both suggested that one reason the Pythons have never been successfully imitated is that television executives nowadays would never let anyone get away with putting together a show like theirs. When they began, they didn't have an idea what the show should be about or even a title for it. The BBC gave them some money, and then, Mr. Cleese joked, the executives hurried off to the bar.

"The great thing was that in the beginning we had such a low profile," he said. "We went on at different times, and some weeks we didn't go on at all, because there might be a show-jumping competition. But that was the key to our feeling of freedom. We didn't know what the viewing figures were, and we didn't care. What has happened now is the complete reverse. Even the BBC is obsessed with the numbers."

So obsessed, Bill Jones pointed out, that in the case of "Monty Python: Almost the Truth" some people encouraged the documentarians to see if they couldn't squeeze the six hours down to one.

For the full story, see:

MATTHEW L. WALD. "Industry Built From Scratch." The New York Times (Thurs., October 15, 2009): B1 & B10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 14th.)

"Above from left, Mr. Jones, Mr. Gilliam, Mr. Cleese, Mr. Idle and Mr. Palin at the premiere of "Spamalot."" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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(p. 423) The work was extraordinarily difficult, pushing the limits of the technically possible. Disappointment is my daily bread, he had said. I thrive on it. But he did not thrive. Often he thought of abandoning the work, abandoning all of it. Yet every day he continued to fill nearly every waking hour with thinking about it. Between 1934 and 1941 he published nothing. Nothing. For a scientist to go through such a dry period is more than depressing. It is a refutation of one's abilities, of one's life. But in the midst of that dry spell, Avery told a young researcher there were two types of investigators: most "go around picking up surface nuggets, and whenever they can spot a surface nugget of gold they pick it up and add it to their collection. . . . [The other type] is not really interested in the surface nugget. He is much more interested in digging a deep hole in one place, hoping to hit a vein. And of course if he strikes a vein of gold he makes a tremendous advance."

Source:

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

(Note: italics, ellipsis, and brackets, all in original.)

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I found the passage quoted below to be especially illuminating on how rapid mutation helps explain why the flu virus is so successful and dangerous. (An additional important factor is that the virus can survive in birds, without killing them.)

It occurs to me that something akin to rapid mutation (e.g., rapid experimentation) has also been advocated as a way to quickly advance science (Karl Popper), or enterprise (George Gilder).

(p. 105) Whenever an organism reproduces, its genes try to make exact copies of themselves. But sometimes mistakes--mutations--occur in this process.

This is true whether the genes belong to people, plants, or viruses. The more advanced the organism, however, the more mechanisms exist to prevent mutations. A person mutates at a much slower rate than bacteria, bacteria mutates at a much slower rate than a virus--and a DNA virus mutates at a much slower rate than an RNA virus.

DNA has a kind of built-in proofreading mechanism to cut down on copying mistakes. RNA has no proofreading mechanism whatsoever, no way to protect against mutation. So viruses that use RNA to carry their genetic information mutate much faster--from 10,000 to 1 million times faster--than any DNA virus.

Different RNA viruses mutate at different rates as well. A few mutate so rapidly that virologists consider them not so much a population of copies of the same virus as what they call a "quasi species" or a "mutant swarm."

These mutant swarms contain trillions and trillions of closely related but different viruses. Even the viruses produced from a single cell will include many different versions of themselves, and the swarm as a whole will routinely contain almost every possible permutation of its genetic code.

Most of these mutations interfere with the functioning of the virus and will either destroy the virus outright or destroy its ability to infect. But other mutations, sometimes in a single base, a single letter, in its genetic code will allow the virus to adapt rapidly to a new situation. It is this adaptability that explains why these quasi species, these mutant swarms, can move rapidly back and forth between different environments and also develop extraordinarily rapid drug resistance. As one investigator has observed, the rapid mutation "confers a certain randomness to the disease processes that accompany RNA [viral] infections."

Influenza is an RNA virus. So is HIV and the coronavirus. And of all RNA viruses, influenza and HIV are among those that mutate the fastest. The influenza virus mutates so fast that 99 percent of the 100,000 to 1 million new viruses that burst out of a cell in the reproduction process (p. 106) are too defective to infect another cell and reproduce again. But that still leaves between 1,000 and 10,000 viruses that can infect another cell.

Both influenza and HIV fit the concept of a quasi species, of a mutant swarm. In both, a drug-resistant mutation can emerge within days. And the influenza virus reproduces rapidly--far faster than HIV. Therefore it adapts rapidly as well, often too rapidly for the immune system to respond.

Source:

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

(Note: italics in original.)

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Big Tyrannosaurus rex and much smaller Raptorex kriegsteini. Source of image: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/upload/2009/09/raptorex_tiny_king_of_thieves_shows_how_tyrannosaurus_body_p/Raptorex_Trex.jpg

(p. A5) Paleontologists said Thursday that they had discovered what amounted to a miniature prototype of Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with the oversize head, powerful jaws, long legs -- and, as every schoolchild knows, puny arms -- that were hallmarks of the king of the dinosaurs.

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

"The thought was these signature Tyrannosaur features evolved as a consequence of large body size," Stephen L. Brusatte of the American Museum of National History, an author of a paper describing the dinosaur published online by the journal Science, said at a news conference. "They needed to modify their entire skeleton so they could function as a predator at such colossal size."

The new dinosaur, named Raptorex kriegsteini, "really throws a wrench into this observed pattern," Mr. Brusatte said.

For the full story, see:

HENRY FOUNTAIN. "Fossil Discovery Challenges Theories on T. Rex Evolution." The New York Times (Fri., September 18, 2009): A5.

(Note: the online version is dated Sept. 17th and has the slightly different title: "Fossil Find Challenges Theories on T. Rex" but the body of the article seems the same as the print version.)

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John Barry calls our attention to the views of Thomas Huxley who gave the keynote address at the founding of the Johns Hopkins University:

(p. 13) A brilliant scientist, later president of the Royal Society, he advised investigators, "Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." He also believed that learning had purpose, stating, "The great end of life is not knowledge but action."

Source:

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

(Note: from the context in Barry, I am not certain whether the Huxley quotes are from the keynote address, or from elsewhere in Huxley's writings.)

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Source of caricatures: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is no friend of the free market, and more importantly, his manner of dealing with opponents is a long way from gracious civility.

But he is not always completely wrong:

(p. 36) Few economists saw our current crisis coming, . . .

. . .

(p. 37) As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

For the full commentary, see:

PAUL KRUGMAN. "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?." The New York Times, Magazine Section (Sun., September 2, 2009): 36-43.

(Note: ellipses added.)

The economist on the left is probably intended to resemble Keynes, but he also bears some resemblance to Hayek. Source of caricatures: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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(p. B5) Recognizing that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is increasingly used by the public as a news source, Google News began this month to include Wikipedia among the stable of publications it trawls to create the site.

A visit to the Google News home page on Wednesday evening, for example, found that four of the 30 or so articles summarized there had prominent links to Wikipedia articles, including ones covering the global swine flu outbreak and the Iranian election protests.

. . .

The move by Google News was news to Wikipedia itself. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, said he learned about it by reading an online item on the subject by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

"Google is recognizing that Wikipedia is becoming a source for very up-to-date information," he said, although "it is an encyclopedia at the end of the day."

For the full story, see:

NOAM COHEN. "Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site." The New York Times Company (Weds., June 22, 2009): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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". . ., the Italian astronomer shows the satellites of Jupiter to Venetian senators in this 1882 illustration." Source of illustration and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A9) A mathematician and experimental physicist, Galileo, however, immediately recognized that what he could see of Venus, Jupiter and the moon through his telescope offered crucial evidence that the sun, not Earth, was the center of our solar system. The evidence of his eyes overturned 2,000 years of accepted wisdom about cosmology in which philosophers had conceived the night sky as a system of crystalline spheres.

Moreover, Galileo quickly shared his observations with scientists throughout Europe by openly publishing his data.

"He wrought a change so fundamental for science and for humanity," says Munich astronomer Pedro Russo, who is global coordinator of the International Year of Astronomy. "For the first time, we realized we were not the center of the universe."

But his insistence on contradicting traditional cosmology led to his arrest and trial by the Roman Catholic Church. He was forced to recant his views and imprisoned for life. The Vatican did not formally admit that Galileo was correct until 1992. Now Vatican authorities are planning a statue in his honor.

During his life, Galileo is known to have built at least 100 telescopes, mostly as ornate presentation gifts for his patrons -- the powerful Medici family of Florence. Only one is known to survive with its optics intact -- the humble device now on show at the Franklin Institute.

"We assume it was personally used by Galileo," says Paolo Galluzzi, director of the science museum in Florence, which loaned the telescope for the exhibit. "Only this one was found among his property at his death. We believe that this is one of the major tools of his work."

. . .

"Science is fundamentally about establishing truth for yourself," says Dr. Pompea in Arizona. "People can make observations, take data and establish for themselves the nature of the universe. They don't have to take it from someone else or read it in a book."

Like Galileo, "they can see it."

For the full story, see:

ROBERT LEE HOTZ. "Galileo's Discoveries, 400 Years Later, Still Open Eyes
Astronomer's Telescope, on View Outside Italy for the First Time, Helped Expand Perceptions of the Universe." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., APRIL 10, 2009): A9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

"Galileo Galilei." Source of image and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

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Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/Dynamics-Industrial-Cpitalism-Schumpeter-Lectures/dp/0415771676/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1204828232&sr=11-1

Schumpeter is sometimes viewed as having predicted the obsolescence of the entrepreneur, although Langlois documents that Schumpeter was always of two minds on this issue.

Langlois discusses Schumpeter's ambivalence and the broader issue of the roles of the entrepreneur and the corporation in his erudite and useful book on The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. He concludes that changing economic conditions will always require new industrial structures, and the entrepreneur will always be needed to get these new structures built.

(I have written a brief positive review of the book that has recently appeared online.)

Reference to Langlois' book:

Langlois, Richard N. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler and the New Economy. London: Routledge, 2006.

Reference to my review of Langlois' book:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "Review of Richard N. Langlois, The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler and the New Economy." EH.Net Economic History Services, Aug 6 2009. URL: http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/1442

Apparently Langlois likes my review:

http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2009/08/07/another-nanosecond-of-fame/

"Richard N. Langlois." Source of photo and caption: http://www.clas.uconn.edu/facultysnapshots/images/langlois.jpg

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I think the crucial feature of Wikipedia is in its being quick (what "wiki" means in Hawaiian), rather than in its current open source model. Academic knowledge arises in a slow, vetted process. Publication depends on refereeing and revision. On Wikipedia (and the web more generally) knowledge is posted first, and corrected later.

In the actual fact, Wikipedia's coverage is vast, and its accuracy is high.

I speculate that Wikipedia provides clues to developing new, faster, more efficient knowledge generating institutions.

(Chris Anderson has a nice discussion of Wikipedia in The Long Tail, starting on p. 65.)

(p. A13) Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor.

In "The Wikipedia Revolution," Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based encyclopedia -- edited by its user base and overseen by a small group of dedicated volunteers -- came to be so large and so popular, to the point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn't Wikipedia that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the personal computer itself.

. . .

By 2000, both Britannica and Microsoft had subscription-based online encyclopedias. But by then Jimmy Wales, a former options trader in Chicago, was already at work on what he called "Nupedia" -- an "open source, collaborative encyclopedia, using volunteers on the Internet." Mr. Wales hoped that his project, without subscribers, would generate its revenue by selling advertising. Nupedia was not an immediate success. What turned it around was its conversion from a conventionally edited document into a wiki (Hawaiian for "fast") -- that is, a site that allowed anyone browsing it to edit its pages or contribute to its content. Wikipedia was born.

The site grew quickly. By 2003, according to Mr. Lih, "the English edition had more than 100,000 articles, putting it on par with commercial online encyclopedias. It was clear Wikipedia had joined the big leagues." Plans to sell advertising, though, fell through: The user community -- Wikipedia's core constituency -- objected to the whole idea of the site being used for commercial purposes. Thus Wikipedia came to be run as a not-for-profit foundation, funded through donations.

. . .

It is clear by the end of "The Wikipedia Revolution" that the site, for all its faults, stands as an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the open-source content model and of the supremacy of search traffic. Mr. Lih observes that when "dominant encyclopedias" were still hiding behind "paid fire walls" -- and some still are -- Wikipedia was freely available and thus easily crawled by search engines. Not surprisingly, more than half of Wikipedia's traffic comes from Google.

For the full review, see:

JEREMY PHILIPS. "Business Bookshelf; Everybody Knows Everything." Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 18, 2009): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

The book being reviewed, is:

Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

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"Marjorie Grene in 2003." Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

The NYT reported, in the obituary quoted below, that philosopher Marjorie Grene died on March 16, 2009, at the age of 93.

Although I studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, my time there did not overlap with Marjorie Grene's and I don't believe that I ever met her, or ever even heard her speak (though I did occasionally walk past her former husband David Grene, on my way to talk to Stephen Toulmin).

I am increasingly appreciating Michael Polanyi's book Personal Knowledge in which he introduced his view of what he called "tacit knowledge." In particular, I am coming to believe that tacit knowledge is very important in understanding the role and importance of the entrepreneur.

So if Marjorie Grene was crucial to Personal Knowledge, as is indicated in the obituary quoted below, then she is deserving of serious consideration, and high regard.

(p. 23) In Chicago, she had met Michael Polanyi, a distinguished physical chemist turned philosopher; she ended up helping him research and develop his important book "Personal Knowledge" (1958). The book proposed a far more nuanced, personal idea of knowledge, and directly addressed approaches to science.

"There is hardly a page that has not benefited from her criticism," Dr. Polanyi wrote in his acknowledgments. "She has a share in anything I may have achieved here."

. . .

Her sense of humor sparkled when she was asked about being the first woman to have an edition of the Library of Living Philosophers devoted to her -- Volume 29 in 2002. Previous honorees included Bertrand Russell and Einstein. "I thought they must be looking desperately for a woman," Dr. Grene said.

For the full obituary, see:

DOUGLAS MARTIN. "Marjorie Grene, a Leading Philosopher of Biology, Is Dead at 98." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., March 29, 2009): 23.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

The reference for the Polanyi book, is:

Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1958.

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(p. C32) The philosopher Francis Bacon, that great champion of the empirical method, died of his own philosophy: in an effort to observe the effects of refrigeration, on a freezing cold day he stuffed a chicken with snow and caught pneumonia.

As a philosopher dies, so he has lived and believed. And from the manner of his dying we can understand his thinking, or so the philosopher Simon Critchley seems to be saying in his cheekily titled "Book of Dead Philosophers."

. . .

Mr. Critchley recounts that Voltaire, after decades of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church, announced on his deathbed that he wanted to die a Catholic. But the shocked parish priest kept asking him, "Do you believe in the divinity of Christ?" Voltaire begged, "In the name of God, Monsieur, don't speak to me any more of that man and let me die in peace."

Hegel, who, as much as any philosopher, Mr. Critchley says, saw philosophy as an abstraction, while he was dying of cholera, moaned, "Only one man ever understood me ... and he didn't understand me."

For the full review, see:

DINITIA SMITH. "Books of The Times - Dying and Death: When You Sort It Out, What's It All About, Diogenes?" The New York Times (Fri., January 30, 2009): C32.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis in Hegel quote was in original.)

The reference to Critchley's book, is:

Critchley, Simon. The Book of Dead Philosophers. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.

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(p. 69) This is a standard pattern in the history of science: when tools for measuring increase their precision by orders of magnitude, new paradigms often emerge, because the newfound accuracy reveals anomalies that had gone undetected. One of the crucial benefits of increasing the accuracy of scales is that it suddenly became possible to measure things that had almost no weight. Black's discovery of fixed air, and its perplexing mixture with common air, would have been impossible without the state-of-the-art scales he employed in his experiments. The whole inquiry had begun when Black heated a quantity of white magnesia, and discovered that it lost a minuscule amount of weight in the process--a difference that would have been imperceptible using older scales. The shift in weight suggested that something was escaping from the magnesia into the air. By then running comparable experiments, heating a wide array of substances, Black was able to accurately determine the weight of carbon dioxide, and consequently prove the existence of the gas. It weighs, therefore it is.

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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(p. 68) When we think of technological advances powering scientific discovery, the image that conventionally comes to mind is a specifically visual one: tools that expand the range of our vision, that let us literally see the object of study with new clarity, or peer into new levels of the very distant, the very small. Think of the impact that the telescope had on early physics, or the microscope on bacteriology. But new ways of seeing are not always crucial to discovery. The air pump didn't allow you to see the vacuum, because of course there was nothing to see: but it did allow you to see it indirectly, in the force that held the Magdeburg Sphere together despite all that horsepower.

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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George Gilder emphasizes that the importance of entrepreneurship to economic growth has been missed by many economists, in part because of the difficulty of measuring both the inputs of entrepreneurship (e.g., courage, persistence, creativity, etc.) and the outputs of entrepreneurship (e.g., happiness from more challenging work, greater variety of products, etc.).

Unfortunately this is not just an academic problem, because economists' policy advice is based on their models, and their models focus on what they can measure. If they can't measure entrepreneurship, then policies to encourage entrepreneurship are neglected.

Now the Frazer Institute, is seeking proposals to improve the measurement of important poorly measured policy-relevant variables. This initiative is in the spirit of the good work that the Frazer Institute has done in correlating measures of economic freedom with measures of economic growth.

I have been asked to publicize this initiative, and am pleased to do so:

Dear Art Diamond,

The Fraser Institute is launching a new contest to identify economic and public policy issues which still require proper measurement in order to facilitate meaningful analysis and public discourse. We hope you can help promote this contest by posting it on your weblog, artdiamondblog.

The Essay Contest for Excellence in the Pursuit of Measurement is an opportunity for the public to comment on an economic or public policy issue that they feel is important and deserves to be properly measured.

A top prize of $1,000 and other cash prizes can be won by identifying a vital issue that is either not being measured, or is being measured inappropriately. Acceptable entry formats include a short 500-600 word essay, or a short one-minute video essay.

Complete details and a promotional flyer are available at: http://www.fraserinstitute.org/programsandinitiatives/measurement_center.htm.

Entry deadline is Friday, May 15th, 2009.

Sponsored by the R.J. Addington Center for the Study of Measurement.

Enquiries may be directed to:

Courtenay Vermeulen
Education Programs Assistant
The Fraser Institute
Direct: 604.714.4533
courtenay.vermeulen@fraserinstitute.org



The Fraser Institute is an independent international research and educational organization with offices in Canada and the United States and active research ties with similar independent organizations in more than 70 countries around the world. Our vision is a free and prosperous world where individuals benefit from greater choice, competitive markets, and personal responsibility. Our mission is to measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government interventions on the welfare of individuals.

An important source of Gilder's views, obliquely referred to in my comments above, is:

Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

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There is something touchingly noble in this:

(p. 11) There is no direct evidence in the historical record, but it is entirely probable that it was the waterspout sighting that sent Priestley off on his quest to measure the temperature of the sea, trying to marshal supporting evidence for a passing conjecture his friend had made a decade before. Franklin had been dead for nearly four years, but their intellectual collaboration continued, undeterred by war, distance, even death.

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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Source of book image: http://stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/10/invention_final_81908.jpg

Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, about the determined entrepreneurial detective work that uncovered the cause of cholera, is one of my all-time favorite books, so I am now in the mode of reading everything else that Steven Johnson has written, or will write.

The most recent book, The Invention of Air, is not as spectacular as The Ghost Map, but is well-written on a thought-provoking topic. It focuses on Joseph Priestley's role in the American Revolution. Priestley is best known as an early chemist, but Johnson paints him as a poly-math whose science was of a piece with his philosophy, politics and his religion.

Johnson's broader point is that for many of the founding fathers, science was not a compartment of their lives, but part of the whole cloth (hey, it's my blog, so I can mix as many metaphors as I want to).

And the neat bottom line is that Priestley's method of science (and polity) is the same broadly empirical/experimental/entrepreneurial method that usually leads to truth and progress.

Along the way, Johnson makes many amusing and thought-provoking observations, such as the paragraphs devoted to his coffee-house theory of the enlightenment. (You see, coffee makes for clearer thinking than beer.)

The book:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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(p. A23) My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of research. Taleb not only has an explanation for what's happening, he saw it coming. His popular books "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" were broadsides at the risk-management models used in the financial world and beyond.

In "The Black Swan," Taleb wrote, "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup." Globalization, he noted, "creates interlocking fragility." He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse -- "when one fails, they all fail."

Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we've actually benefited from dumb luck.

And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other's risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.

Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk models, which try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which "believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action." If recent events don't underline this worldview, nothing will.

For the full commentary, see:

DAVID BROOKS. "The Behavioral Revolution." The New York Times (Tues., October 28, 2008): A31.

The reference to Taleb's Black Swan book is:

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007.

Another review of Taleb's book is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "Review of: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan." Journal of Scientific Exploration 22, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 419-422.

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In the passage quoted below, Hager discusses the reception that Leeuwenhoeck received to his first report of the "animalcules" seen under his microscope:

(p. 42) He hired a local artist to draw what he saw and sent his findings to the greatest scientific body of the day, the Royal Society of London.

(p. 43) Van Leeuwenhoek's raising of the curtain on a new world was greeted with what might kindly be called a degree of skepticism. Three centuries later a twentieth-century wit wrote a lampoon of what the Royal Society's secretary might well have responded:

Dear Mr. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek,

Your letter of October 10th has been received here with amusement. Your account of myriad "little animals" seen swimming in rainwater, with the aid of your so-called "microscope," caused the members of the society considerable merriment when read at our most recent meeting. Your novel descriptions of the sundry anatomies and occupations of these invisible creatures led one member to imagine that your "rainwater" might have contained an ample portion of distilled spirits---imbibed by the investigator. Another member raised a glass of clear water and exclaimed, "Behold, the Africk of Leeuwenhoek." For myself, I withhold judgement as to the sobriety of your observations and the veracity of your instrument. However, a vote having been taken among the members---accompanied, I regret to inform you, by considerable giggling---it has been decided not to publish your communication in the Proceedings of this esteemed society. However, all here wish your "little animals" health, prodigality and good husbandry by their ingenious "discoverer."

The satire was not far from the truth. Although very interested in the Dutchman's discoveries, so many English scientists were doubtful about his reports that van Leeuwenhoek had to enlist an English vicar and several jurists to attest to his findings. Then Hooke himself confirmed them. All doubt was dispelled.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

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One of Domagk's predecessors, in goal and method, was Paul Ehrlich, who was a leader in the search for the Zuberkugeln (magic bullet) against disease causing organisms. He systematized the trial and error method, and pursued dyes as promising chemicals that might be modified to attach themselves to the intruders. But he never quite found a magic bullet:

(p. 82) Ehrlich announced to the world that he had found a cure for sleeping sickness. But he spoke too soon. Number 418, also, proved too toxic for general use. He and his chemists resumed the search.

Ehrlich said his method consisted basically of "examining and sweating"---and his coworkers joked that Ehrlich examined while they sweated. There was another motto attributed to Ehrlich's lab, the list of "Four Gs" needed for success: Geduld, Geschick, Glück, Geld---patience, skill, luck, and money.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

(Note: do not confuse the "Paul Ehrlich" discussed above, with the modern environmentalist "Paul Ehrlich" who is best known for losing his bet with Julian Simon.)

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The sources of new ideas are diverse. Sometimes, as below, even a newspaper article can provide inspiration.

The passage below also provides another example of the project oriented entrepreneur, who is motivated by a mission to get the job done.

(p. 60) In Lister's early years, the mid-1800s, half of all amputation patients died from hospital fever; in some hospitals the rate was as high as 80 percent. Lister, like all surgeons, had little idea of how to improve the situation. Then he chanced on a newspaper article that caught his interest. It described how the residents of a local town, tired of the smell of their sewage, had begun treating it by pouring into their system something called German Creosote, a by-product of coal tar. Something in the creosote stopped the smell. Lister had heard about the work of Pasteur, and he made the same mental connection the French chemist had: The stink of sewage came from putrefaction, rotting organic matter; the stink of infected wounds also came from putrefaction; whatever stopped the putrefaction of sewage might also stop the putrefaction of infected wounds. So Lister decided to try coal-tar chemicals on his patients. And he found one that worked exceptionally well: carbolic acid, a solution of what today is called phenol.   . . .

. . .

(p. 61) Lister's insistence on stopping the transfer of bacteria in the operating room became absolute. Once when a visiting knighted physician from King's College idly poked a forefinger into a patient's incision during one of Lister's operations, Lister flung him bodily from the room.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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Whether in science, or in entrepreneurship, at the initial stages of an important new idea, the majority of experts will reject the idea. So a key for the advance of science, or for innovation in the economy, is to allow scientists and entrepreneurs to accumulate sufficient resources so that they can make informed bets based on their conjectures, and on their tacit knowledge.

A few entries ago, Hager recounted how Leeuwenhoek faced initial skepticism from the experts. In the passage below, Hager recounts how Pasteur also faced initial skepticism from the experts:

(p. 44) If bacteria could rot meat, Pasteur reasoned, they could cause diseases, and he spent years proving the point. Two major problems hindered the acceptance of his work within the medical community: First, Pasteur, regardless of his ingenuity, was a brewing chemist, not a physician, so what could he possibly know about disease? And second, his work was both incomplete and imprecise. He had inferred that bacteria caused disease, but it was impossible for him to definitively prove the point. In order to prove that a type of bacterium could cause a specific disease, precisely and to the satisfaction of the scientific world, it would be necessary to isolate that one type of bacterium for study, to create a pure culture, and then test the disease-causing abilities of this pure culture.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

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(p. 40) Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was a scientific superstar. The greats of Europe traveled from afar to see him and witness his wonders. It was (p. 41) not just the leading minds of the era---Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Christopher Wren---but also royalty, the prince of Liechtenstein and Queen Mary, wife of William III of Orange. Peter the great of Russia took van Leeuwenhoek for an afternoon sail on his yacht. Emperor Charles of Spain planned to visit as well but was prevented by a strong eastern storm.

It was nothing that the Dutch businessman had ever expected. He came from an unknown family, had scant education, earned no university degrees, never traveled far from Delft, and knew no language other than Dutch. At age twelve he had been apprenticed to a linen draper, learned the trade, then started his own business as a fabric merchant when he came of age, making ends meet by taking on additional work as a surveyor, wine assayer, and minor city official. He picked up a skill at lens grinding along the way, a sort of hobby he used to make magnifying glasses so he could better see the quality of fabrics he bought and sold. At some point he got hold of a copy of Micrographia, a curious and very popular book by the British scientist Robert Hooke. Filled with illustrations, Micrographia showed what Hooke had sen through a novel instrument made of two properly ground and arranged lenses, called a "microscope."  . . .   Micrographia was an international bestseller in its day. Samuel Pepys stayed up until 2:00 A.M. one night poring over it, then told his friends it was "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life."

Van Leeuwenhoek, too was fascinated. He tried making his own microscopes and, as it turned out, had talent as a lens grinder. His lens were better than anyone's in Delft; better than any Hooke had access to; better, it seemed, than any in the world.  . . .  

(p. 42) Then, in the summer of 1675, he looked deep within a drop of water from a barrel outside and became the first human to see an entirely new world. In that drop he could make out a living menagerie of heretofore invisible animals darting, squirming, and spinning.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

(Note: ellipses added.)

The example above is consistent with Baumol's hypotheses about formal education mattering less, in the initial stages of great discoveries. (And maybe even being a hindrance).

See:

Baumol, William J. "Education for Innovation: Entrepreneurial Breakthroughs Versus Corporate Incremental Improvements." In Innovation Policy and the Economy, edited by Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern, 33-56. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

The example is also consistent with Terence Kealey's claim that important science can often arise as a side-effect of the pursuit of business activity.

See:

Kealey, Terence. The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

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"Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

Source:

Albert Einstein, as quoted in Koch, Charles G. The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.

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(p. 26) Even the wisest of them were at a hopeless disadvantage, for their only guide in sorting it all out---the only guide anyone ever has---was the past, and precedents are worse than useless when facing something entirely new. They suffered another handicap. As medieval men, crippled by ten centuries of immobility, they viewed the world through distorted prisms peculiar to their age.

In all that time nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined. Except for the introduction of waterwheels in the 800s and windmills in the late 1100s, there had been no inventions of significance. No startling new ideas had appeared, no new terri-(p. 27)tories outside Europe had been explored. Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could remember. The center of the Ptolemaic universe was the known world---Europe, with the Holy Land and North Africa on its fringes. The sun moved round it every day. Heaven was above the immovable earth, somewhere in the overarching sky; hell seethed far beneath their feet. Kings ruled at the pleasure of the Almighty; all others did what they were told to do. Jesus, the son of God, had been crucified and resurrected, and his reappearance was imminent, or at any rate inevitable. Every human being adored him (the Jews and the Muslims being invisible). The Church was indivisible, the afterlife a certainty; all knowledge was already known. And nothing would ever change.

The mighty storm was swiftly approaching, but Europeans were not only unaware of it; they were convinced that such a phenomenon could not exist. Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, they trudged into the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly toward the future they thought they knew---gullible, pitiful innocents who were about to be swept up in the most powerful, incomprehensible, irresistible vortex since Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and extinguished the lamps of learning a thousand years before.

Source:

Manchester, William. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, Portrait of an Age. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1993.

(Note: italics in original.)

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As I think about the current financial crisis, I have been struck by the uncertainty among economists about what should be done. Many economists are silent. Those who speak, have offered very diverse opinions. And even among those who express opinions, there is a lack of confidence in their opinions.

Milton Friedman used to say that economists will be listened to when there is a crisis, and that economists need to be ready, as Friedman himself was with his floating exchange rate proposal. (Milton, we need you again.)

I believe that one lesson from the current crisis is that we need reform---reform of economists' research priorities and methods. We should become more interested in policy relevance, history and institutions; and less interested in mathematical rigor.

We should avoid what Schumpeter called "the Ricardian Vice." (Highly stylized, aggregated models, based on unrealistic simplifying assumptions, that are then blindly applied to policy decisions in the actual, richly "thick" world---see McCloskey's essay on thick and thin methods in economics.)

We also should spend less time in studying cute, counter-intuitive results ("freakonomics"), and spend more time on the big issues.

We should be willing to suggest institutional reforms and experiments, and participate in experiments (natural and artificial) to see how they work. (Spontaneous order is nice when it happens, but entrepreneurial vision and initiative can improve the world too.)

Capitalism has produced huge gains in longevity and standards of living. Yet capitalism is in danger of being hobbled or destroyed.

Schumpeter warned of "the crumbling of the protecting walls." We should have been better prepared to rebuild and defend them.

Note: The "Ricardian Vice" phrase is from Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, p. 473; the "protecting walls" phrase is from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 143.

The McCloskey essay mentioned is:

McCloskey, Deirdre. "Thick and Thin Methodologies in the History of Economic Thought." In The Popperian Legacy in Economics, 245-57. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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McCraw on Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis:

(p. 460) . . . , Schumpeter compared Keynes to David Ricardo: "His work, is a striking example of what we have called above the Ricardian Vice, namely, the habit of piling a heavy load of practical conclusions upon a tenuous groundwork, which was unequal to it yet seemed in its simplicity not only attractive but also convincing. All this goes a long way though not the whole way toward answering the questions that always interest us, namely the questions what it is in a man's message that makes people listen to him, and why and how."

Source:

McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: italics in original.)

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McCraw on Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis:

(p. 461) History of Economic Analysis succeeds where much economic writing or our own time fails, having sacrificed the messy humanity of its subject on the alter of mathematical rigor. Above all else, Schumpeter's History is an epic analytical narrative. It is about real human beings, moored in their own time, struggling like characters in a a novel to resolve difficult problems. Sometimes the problems (p. 462) are purely intellectual. Sometimes they are issues of public policy. Often they are both. But what Schumpeter was trying to do---and in fact did---was answer the deceptively simple question he posed in the early pages of his book: to discover "how economists have come to reason as they do."

Source:

McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

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From McCraw's discussion of Schumpeter's "legacy":

(p. 500) In the new world of academic economics, neither the Schumpeterian entrepreneur as an individual nor entrepreneurship as a phenomenon attracts much attention. For professors in economics departments at most major universities, particularly in the United States and Britain, a focus on these favorite issues of Schumpeter's has become a quick ticket out of a job. This development arose from a self-generated isolation of academic economics from history, sociology, and the other social sciences. It represented a trend that Schumpeter himself had glimpsed and lamented but that accelerated rapidly during the two generations after his death.

Source:

McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

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Here is McCraw discussing and quoting Schumpeter's notes for the Walgreen Lectures that he was preparing to deliver just before he died.

(p. 475) In notes he prepared in 1949 for the prestigious Walgreen Lectures, Schumpeter headed one entire section "The Personal Element and the Element of Chance: A Principle of Indeterminateness." Here, he wrote that the time had come for economists to face a problem they had long tried to dodge:

the problem of the influence that may be exerted by exceptional individuals, a problem that has hardly ever been treated without the most blatant preconceptions. Without committing ourselves either to hero worship or to its hardly less absurd opposite, we have got to realize that, since the emergence of exceptional indi-(p. 476)viduals does not lend itself to scientific generalization, there is here an element that, together with the element of random occurrences with which it may be amalgamated, seriously limits our ability to forecast the future. That is what is meant here by "a principle of indeterminateness." To put it somewhat differently: social determinism, where it is nonoperational, is a creed like any other and entirely unscientific.

Source:

McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

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In the book The Genome War, the story is told about how the leading theorist proved the impossibility of the gene sequencing technique. It was the Venter group that gave it a try and proved it could work. This story is similar to the one about theory saying that what Marconi was trying, was impossible. (See: Larson, 2006.)

Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986) discuss the case that theory had proven how solid objects fall. But Galileo's experiments proved them wrong. This established the primacy of experiment and evidence, over theory.

When governments decide, they usually do what is safe, which is to follow current theory (or in rare cases, they pick Lysenko).

The entrepreneurial system, takes advantage of the tacit individual knowledge that is out there, but not yet theoretically defensible, and allows it to percolate to success.

References:

Larson, Erik. Thunderstruck. New York: Crown, 2006.

Rosenberg, Nathan, and L.E. Birdzell, Jr. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

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The method of the Chicago School is often thought to be the method outlined in Friedman's famous essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics." It can be (and has been) persuasively argued that the actual methodology practiced by Friedman is broader, and more eclectic than that advocated in his early essay.

His practice continued to exemplify a kind of empiricism, but it was a kind of empiricism that included, not only 'rigorous' econometrics, but also economic history, case studies, and 'stylized facts.'

I believe that the method of Friedman's practice is sounder than the method of his essay. So it is unfortunate that the Institute founded in Friedman's name will probably only support those who practice the formal method of the essay.

(p. B5) The University of Chicago will announce Thursday that it plans to establish a center for economics honoring the late economist Milton Friedman.

The school plans to raise an endowment of $200 million to support the Milton Friedman Institute.

. . .

. . . his approach to economics embodies what has come to be known as the Chicago School. He defined that as "an approach that insists on the empirical testing of theoretical generalizations and that rejects alike facts without theory and theory without facts."

It is that approach, and the intellectual rigor that Mr. Friedman brought to it, that the Friedman Institute is meant to advocate, rather than any ideology, says Chicago economist Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning former student of Mr. Friedman's who was on the faculty committee that recommended the institute.

For the full story, see:

JUSTIN LAHART. "University Plans Institute to Honor Milton Friedman." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 15, 2008): B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

The famous Friedman method essay is:

Friedman, Milton. "The Methodology of Positive Economics." In Essays in Positive Economics, 3-43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

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The passages below are from a WSJ summary of an October 2007 article in Wired:

(p. B7) Scientists shouldn't be so quick to squelch the results of failed experiments, Wired Deputy Editor Thomas Goetz says.

Even if data don't deliver hoped-for results, they still have uses. This is especially the case today, when some compelling discoveries have come from meta-studies, in which statisticians sift the data of several papers to reach conclusions. "Your dead end may be another scientist's missing link, the elusive chunk of data they needed," Mr. Goetz says. Making such data available might one day fuel advances in genetics, neuroscience and biotechnology, he contends.

For the full summary, see:

"The Informed Reader; Science; Researchers' 'Dark Data' Should Be Brought to Light." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Oct. 4, 2007): B7.

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(p. A1) Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months?

The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.

. . .

(p. A22) To his surprise, Dr. Palese stumbled upon a solution that appeared to be a good second best.

Reading a paper published in 1919 in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the flu epidemic at Camp Cody in New Mexico, he came upon a key passage: "It is interesting to note that very soon after the epidemic of influenza reached this camp, our laboratory guinea pigs began to die." At first, the study's authors wrote, they thought the animals had died from food poisoning. But, they continued, "a necropsy on a dead pig revealed unmistakable signs of pneumonia."

Dr. Palese bought some guinea pigs and exposed them to the flu virus. Just as the paper suggested, they got the flu and spread it among themselves. So Dr. Palese and his colleagues began their experiments.

. . .

As for Dr. Palese, he was glad he spotted the journal article that mentioned guinea pigs.

"Sometimes it pays to read the old literature," he said.

 

For the full story, see:

GINA KOLATA. "Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter." The New York Times (Weds., December 5, 2007): A1 & A22.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

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"Without DNA tests, the rare greenback cutthroat trout, left, and the Colorado River cutthroat fish are difficult to tell apart." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 26) DENVER, Oct. 13 (AP) -- State and federal biologists, who are smarting from research showing that they may have been protecting the wrong fish the past 20 years, are regrouping in their efforts to restore the rare greenback cutthroat trout to Colorado waters.

Tom Nesler, the state biologist, had hoped to see the fish removed from the endangered species list during his career. He concedes that might not happen if it turns out some of the greenback populations biologists thought they were saving are actually the similar but more common Colorado River cutthroat trout.

A three-year study led by University of Colorado researchers and published in August found that out of nine fish populations believed to be descendants of original greenbacks, five were actually Colorado River cutthroat trout.

The recovery effort was thought to be near its goal of establishing 20 self-sustaining greenback populations.

"Hey, science happens," said Mr. Nesler with a shrug as he discussed the findings.

. . .

The Colorado Division of Wildlife has spent an average of $320,000 annually for the past five years to restore the greenback. Most of the money has come from state lottery revenue; no state tax dollars have been used.

. . .

"Science is not about proof and certainty," he said, "it's about testable hypotheses."

For the full story, see:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. "After Possible 'Oops,' a Trout Rescue Project Regroups." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., October 14, 2007): 26.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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   Source of graphic: the online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1)  JORDAN, Mont. -- Prospecting in Montana's badlands, rock ax in hand, paleontologist Jack Horner picks up a piece of the jawbone of a dinosaur. He examines the splinter, then puts it back and moves on. It isn't the kind of bone he is looking for.

Prof. Horner is searching for something that many scientists believe no longer exists: dinosaur bones that harbor blood cells, protein and, perhaps, even DNA.

"Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons," he says. "We are looking for information."

. . .  

Prof. Horner, a curator at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, is among the world's most influential and offbeat paleontologists. He pioneered studies of dinosaur parent-(p. A12)ing behavior, species variation and bone cells. He is dyslexic, a former Special Forces operative of the Vietnam War era, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow, and a chaired professor of Montana State University who never finished a formal college degree.

"The lenses that people normally use to look at stuff are broken in Jack," says Mary Schweitzer, an assistant professor of paleontology at North Carolina State University, who has worked with him for years. "That's what makes Jack such a good scientist. Every now and then, every field should get a renegade weirdo in it who challenges assumptions."

. . .  

"The chances of finding any [dinosaur] DNA are pretty low," Prof. Horner acknowledges. "I am still hopeful."

In a field mostly outside the mainstream of federal research funding, Prof. Horner has a knack for attracting private grants. Star Wars producer George Lucas, Qualcomm co-founder Klein Gilhousen and Wade Dokken, a developer of Montana real estate, have contributed toward his research, the university says. Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer at Microsoft Corp. and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures LLC, is helping to underwrite this season's fieldwork.

This summer, in Montana's Hell Creek Formation, Prof. Horner is searching the last landscape inhabited by dinosaurs. More than 65 million years ago, this plain was a wetland where herds of horned Triceratops watered. Today, it is an arid outwash of boulders, cactus and sage. The red and gray soil is littered with white shards of petrified wood that ring like bone china when tapped together and countless crumbs of dinosaur bone.

. . .

"As long as you are not bound by preconceived ideas of what you can find," Prof. Horner says, "there are an awful lot of things you can discover."

For the full story, see:

ROBERT LEE HOTZ. "Dinosaur Hunter Seeks More Than Just Bare Bones; Prof. Horner Searches For Traces of Blood, DNA; Lucky Break From T. Rex."  The Wall Street Journal  (Fri., August 24, 2007):  A1 & A12.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

     At top, Prof. Horner; at bottom: "Sarah Keenan, 21, an undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who is working this summer for Prof. Horner, covers the fossilized triceratops frill in a protective jacket of plaster."  Source of caption and photos: the online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

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    Source of book image:  http://palmaddict.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/big_larsonthunderstruckdrm_1.jpg

Larson's book plays off a murder mystery against Marconi as the innovator who brought us communication through the air. 

I'm most enthused about hte Marconi part.  It shows how he proceeded against the theorists of the day, whose theories told them that what he was trying to do was impossible.  He was more entrepreneur, than scientist.  And it turned out that it was a good thing that the theoretical scientists did not rule, as they might if all decisions about technology were made by the government.

What happened here is an example of what Taleb would call a Black Swan.

Source:

Larson, Erik. Thunderstruck. New York: Crown, 2006.

Posted by Art Diamond at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

    Source of book image:  http://palmaddict.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/big_larsonthunderstruckdrm_1.jpg

Larson's book plays off a murder mystery against Marconi as the innovator who brought us communication through the air. 

I'm most enthused about hte Marconi part.  It shows how he proceeded against the theorists of the day, whose theories told them that what he was trying to do was impossible.  He was more entrepreneur, than scientist.  And it turned out that it was a good thing that the theoretical scientists did not rule, as they might if all decisions about technology were made by the government.

What happened here is an example of what Taleb would call a Black Swan.

Source:

Larson, Erik. Thunderstruck. New York: Crown, 2006.

Posted by Art Diamond at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   A statue of the mapinguary in Rio Branco, Brazil.  Source of the photo:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. 

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — Perhaps it is nothing more than a legend, as skeptics say. Or maybe it is real, as those who claim to have seen it avow. But the mere mention of the mapinguary, the giant slothlike monster of the Amazon, is enough to send shivers down the spines of almost all who dwell in the world’s largest rain forest.

The folklore here is full of tales of encounters with the creature, and nearly every Indian tribe in the Amazon, including those that have had no contact with one another, have a word for the mapinguary (pronounced ma-ping-wahr-EE). The name is usually translated as “the roaring animal” or “the fetid beast.”

. . .  

The giant ground sloth, Megatherium, was once one of the largest mammals to walk the earth, bigger than a modern elephant. Fossil evidence is abundant and widespread, found as far south as Chile and as far north as Florida. But the trail stops cold thousands of years ago.

“When you travel in the Amazon, you are constantly hearing about this animal, especially when you are in contact with indigenous peoples,” said Peter Toledo, an expert on sloths at the Goeldi Institute. “But convincing scientific proof, in the form of even vestiges of bones, blood or excrement, is always lacking.”

Glenn Shepard Jr., an American ethnobiologist and anthropologist based in Manaus, said he was among the skeptics until 1997, when he was doing research about local wildlife among the Machiguenga people of the far western Amazon, in Peru. Tribal members all mentioned a fearsome slothlike creature that inhabited a hilly, forested area in their territory.

Dr. Shepard said “the clincher that really blew me away” came when a member of the tribe remarked matter of factly that he had also seen a mapinguary at the natural history museum in Lima. Dr. Shepard checked; the museum has a diorama with a model of the giant prehistoric ground sloth.

“At the very least, what we have here is an ancient remembrance of a giant sloth, like those found in Chile recently, that humans have come into contact with,” he said. “Let me put it this way: Just because we know that mermaids and sirens are myths doesn’t mean that manatees don’t exist.”

Even so, the mystery of the mapinguary is likely to continue, as is the search.

“There’s still an awful lot of room out there for a large sloth to be roaming around,” Dr. Shepard said.

For the full story, see: 

LARRY ROHTER.  "A Huge Amazon Monster Is Only a Myth. Or Is It?"  The New York Times, Section 1  (Sun., July 8, 2007):  3. 

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

Some scientists believe that the mapinguary may be based on actual sightings of a real creature related to the Megarium, two of whom are depicted above.  Source of the photo:  online version of the NYT article cited above. 

   Source of the map:  online version of the NYT article cited above. 

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   The Berkeley Pit was once a copper mine, and now holds a lake of toxic waste.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Here are a few paragraphs from a fascinating story about a couple of people who seem to be practicing what Taleb is preaching in The Black Swan:

BUTTE, Mont. — Death sits on the east side of this city, a 40-billion-gallon pit filled with corrosive water the color of a scab. On the opposite side sits the small laboratory of Don and Andrea Stierle, whose stacks of plastic Petri dishes are smeared with organisms pulled from the pit. Early tests indicate that some of those organisms may help produce the next generation of cancer drugs.

From death’s soup, the Stierles hope to coax life.

“I love the idea of looking at toxic waste and finding something of value,” said Ms. Stierle, 52, a chemistry researcher at Montana Tech of the University of Montana.

For decades, scientists assumed that nothing could live in the Berkeley Pit, a hole 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide that was one of the world’s largest copper mines until 1982, when the Atlantic Richfield Company suspended work there. The pit filled with water that turned as acidic as vinegar, laced with high concentrations of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc.

. . .

Mr. Stierle is a tenured professor at Montana Tech, but his wife gets paid only for teaching an occasional class or if there is a grant to finance her research. From 1996 to 2001 they applied for dozens of grants, but received only rejection letters. So they financed their own research, using personal savings and $12,000 in annual patent royalty payments. In 2001, they won a six-year, $800,000 grant from the United States Geological Survey.

“Their work is considered a very high-risk approach,” said Matthew D. Kane, a program director at the National Science Foundation. “It takes a long time to get funding, and some luck to find active compounds.”

Unlike scientists at large research universities, who commonly teach only one class a year and employ graduate students to run their laboratories, Mr. Stierle teaches four classes each semester at a college with 2,000 undergraduates and no major research presence.

. . .

The couple said they were negotiating privately with a pharmaceutical company to test some of the compounds they have discovered and possibly turn them into drugs. As they wait, they open another Mason jar filled with murky pit water, draw a sample and return to work.

“The pit very easily could have been a complete waste of time,” Mr. Stierle said. “We just had luck and worked our butts off. We take that first walk into the dark.”

For the full story, see:

CHRISTOPHER MAAG.  "In the Battle Against Cancer, Researchers Find Hope in a Toxic Wasteland."   The New York Times  (Tues., October 9, 2007):  A21.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

   In the photo immediately above, Don and Andrea Steirle work in their lab.  The map to the left shows the location of the Berkeley Pit.  Source of the photo and map:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Posted by Art Diamond at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   Source of book image:  http://store.43folders.com/books-3-1400063515-The_Black_Swan_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable

This is part entertaining rant and part serious epistemology.  I've finished 9 of 19 chapters so far--almost all of my reading time spent smiling. 

Historians of Greek philosophy used to tell the story of one of the first philosophers, Thales of Miletus, that he once was watching the stars, and fell into a well.  The citizens of Miletus made fun of him being an impractical philosopher.  To prove them wrong, he used his knowledge to corner the market in something, and made a fortune. 

Not a very plausible story, but appealing to us philosophers.  (Like Thales, we like to think we could all be rich, if we didn't have higher goals.)

Well apparently Taleb is the real Thales.  He wanted to be a philosopher, got rich on Wall Street using his epistemological insights, and is now using his wealth to finance his musings on whatever he cares to muse on.

Beautiful!

Here's an amusing sentence that broadened my grin.  (It was even more amusing, and profound, in context, but I don't have time to type in the context for you.)

(p. 87)  If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles in "prestigious" publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conferences.

Reference for the book:

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007.

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Another of Sherwin Rosen’s minor acts of methodological delinquency, this time in his role as co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy, was his asking me to review Alexander Rosenberg’s criticism of the economics profession for drifting further and further into irrelevant mathematical puzzle-solving.  My review was basically favorable to Rosenberg, and my memory is that Rosen was quite content with my review.

The reference to my review is:

"Review of:  Alexander Rosenberg's Economics--Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns?."  Journal of Political Economy 104, no. 3 (June 1996):  655-659.

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I remember hearing Sherwin Rosen speak to a good-sized auditorium of technical economists at a plenary session of the Fifth World Congress of the Econometric Society in 1985.[i]  Rosen was proceeding in his typically bemused style, when he suggested to the stunned audience that they might benefit from re-reading Alfred Marshall.  I remember him saying that there are some things in Marshall that we don’t talk about any more, but that we should still talk about.  I specifically remember him mentioning that Marshall had said that the success of the institution of contract depended on the correct expectation of a certain level of ethical behavior among the participants in the economy.  I wish I could remember the specifics better, but Rosen’s auditors were visibly dismayed, and I supposed that they were thinking something like:  ‘read Marshall?, here was the sad sight of a once proud theoretician, going soft and senile.’

"Program of the Fifth World Congress of the Econometric Society.”  Econometrica 54, no. 2 (March 1986):  459-505.

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  James Buchanan (center) flanked by economics graduate students at the the closing dinner of the 2007 Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics, held at George Mason University.  (Source of photo:  me.)

On the evening of Thursday, June 7, 2007, Nobel-prize-winner James Buchanan joined participants for their final dinner-gathering at George Mason's Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics.

As a young economist, you are advised that it is never productive to dispute the decisions of journal editors. 

But Buchanan, in conversation during the dinner, mentioned that he had only once disputed a journal rejection--of an article submitted to the JPE during Harry Johnson's editorship.  Buchanan said that he wrote Johnson a letter explaining that the referees had totally misunderstood his paper; Johnson read the paper himself, agreed with Buchanan, and published it.

This tells us something about Buchanan, but also something about Johnson.  I never took a class from Johnson, but had a conversation with him at a party or reception once, in the last year or two before his death.  All I remember about the conversation was that he was polite and respectful to an unknown graduate student, and that somehow we got onto the topic of car advertising.

I remember hearing that sometimes Harry Johnson whittled on wood carving projects during committee meetings.  Someone asked him why he did that, and he is reputed to have responded that at the end of the meeting he liked to feel as though something at been accomplished.

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Noctilucent clouds.  Source of photo:  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/9907/noctilucent_pp.jpg

The excerpt below is from a WSJ summary of an article from the  June 2007 issue of Seed.

Many other scientific discoveries have come from astronauts puzzling over strange sights around them. Most of what is known about so-called noctilucent clouds -- thin, beautiful wisps that hover at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere -- comes from 30 years of astronauts sketching and trying to photograph them in their spare time. The strength of a certain type of cosmic ray was first recognized in 1969 when Buzz Aldrin asked fellow astronauts if they, like him, were seeing occasional streaks of light when their eyes were closed.

Such discoveries off the beaten path of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's research agenda prompt the question attributed to an Apollo program geologist: "If human beings can do much better science than robots, why does NASA make its astronauts do science like robots?"

For the full summary, see: 

"Informed Reader; SCIENCE; Why Astronauts Need Down Time in Space."  The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 9, 2007):  B15.

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The following two paragraphs are from a paper I am currently working on.

Milton Friedman wrote a Newsweek column many years ago that caused a firestorm of anger among his colleagues in the economics profession. Friedman’s argument was that, in general, the government is not going to do a good job of identifying the best and most productively innovative economists. In particular, he argued that economics funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) had made the economics profession more mathematical than was appropriate.

Even his ‘Chicago’ colleagues, who were otherwise inclined to be sympathetic to his work, were appalled: Robert Lucas wrote against Friedman in the New York Times, and Zvi Griliches spoke against him before Congress. 

Not too long after Friedman’s article came out, I praised it during one of the sessions of a Liberty Fund colloquium held in California.  After the session, a very distinguished economist came up to me, and started talking about the Friedman article in a very irritated and animated manner.  He said that what Friedman wrote in the article, might be true, but he shouldn’t have written it in a public forum.[i]  He said that within the NSF, the physicists have always been opposed to funding economics, and that Friedman’s article gave the physicists just the ammunition they needed.  I remember distinctly that after this conversation, the distinguished economist got into his very large and very expensive car and drove off.  To the cynical, it may also be worth mentioning that this economist had received very substantial funding from the NSF.

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    Photos of strange deep sea creatures.  Source of photos:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

When, more than 70 years ago, William Beebe became the first scientist to descend into the abyss, he described a world of twinkling lights, silvery eels, throbbing jellyfish, living strings as “lovely as the finest lace” and lanky monsters with needlelike teeth.

“It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived,” he wrote in “Half Mile Down” (Harcourt Brace, 1934). “I would focus on some one creature and just as its outlines began to be distinct on my retina, some brilliant, animated comet or constellation would rush across the small arc of my submarine heaven and every sense would be distracted, and my eyes would involuntarily shift to this new wonder.”

Beebe sketched some of the creatures, because no camera of the day was able to withstand the rigors of the deep and record the nuances of this cornucopia of astonishments.

Colleagues reacted coolly. Some accused Beebe of exaggeration. One reviewer suggested that his heavy breathing had fogged the window of the submarine vessel, distorting the undersea views.

Today, the revolution in lights, cameras, electronics and digital photography is revealing a world that is even stranger than the one that Beebe struggled to describe.

The images arrayed here come from “The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss” (University of Chicago Press, 2007), by Claire Nouvian, a French journalist and film director.

. . .

Beebe, who ran the tropical research department at the New York Zoological Society, surely had intimations of what lay beyond the oceanic door he had opened. “The Deep” brings much of that dark landscape to light, even while noting that a vast majority of the planet’s largest habitat remains unexamined, awaiting a new generation of explorers. 

For the full story, see: 

WILLIAM J. BROAD.  "Mysteries to Behold in the Dark Down Deep: Seadevils and Species Unknown."  The New York Times  (Tues.,  May 22, 2007):  D3.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

    "A Ping-Pong tree sponge."  Source of caption and photo:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

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The excerpt below is from a WSJ summary of an article that appeared in The Economist on May 19, 2007.

Scientists have taken to upgrading animals once thought to be subspecies into full-fledged species, in what the Economist says is an overzealous attempt to boost conservation of seemingly rare animals.

Sometimes, the reclassification of animals into their own species category is warranted, as new research reveals once-obscured markers that differentiate certain beasts. But lately, the weekly says, primatologists have been suffering from "taxonomic inflation."

. . .

. . .   One reason is that by fragmenting animal groups, the number of rare species increases, boosting animal-conservation claims.  At the same time, having a greater number of species boosts the chances that a habitat can pursue a legal designation as a protected area.

For the full summary, see: 

"Informed Reader; NATURE; Species Inflation May Infect Over-Eager Conservationists."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., May 19, 2007):  A6.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

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On a bright Saturday afternoon earlier this month, 30 or so of us gathered to give James O. Hall the send-off he deserved. Appropriately enough, the memorial service was held in the James O. Hall Research Center of the Surratt House museum, in Clinton, Md., 12 miles south of Washington. Mr. Hall died in February at the age of 95, leaving no immediate survivors. The 30 who showed up were instead neighbors, friends, a pair of nieces and random hangers-on who, like me, had known him only slightly but who honored him as a giant in a long and noble and underappreciated line.

I don't think there's a good word for what Mr. Hall did: "researcher" is too dry, "historical investigator" carries hints of melodrama, and "archivist" suggests a dutiful drudge, which Mr. Hall was not. "Amateur historian" probably fits best, though it sounds vaguely derivative and second-tier. Following a career with the Labor Department -- he retired in the early 1970s -- Mr. Hall turned himself into the world's foremost authority on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Historians, pros and amateurs alike, sought him out for his knowledge and access to his exhaustive files. As one of them put it, James O. Hall knew more about Lincoln's murder than anyone who ever lived, including John Wilkes Booth.

. . .

"I had to teach myself genealogy," he said. "Not because I liked genealogy, but because it's how you find things that have been lost." Over the years, he tried to trace the descendants of everyone even remotely tied to the assassination. When he found a new great-granddaughter or the grandson of a nephew, he politely peppered that person with letters and phone calls, asking the descendant to rummage through attics -- or offering, even better, to do it himself. His industry never flagged, and it led him to some of his greatest discoveries. In a dusty cubby in a forgotten archive, Mr. Hall made one of the major Lincoln finds of the past 50 years: a letter of self-justification Booth wrote the morning of the murder.

Typically, in 1977, Mr. Hall chose to publish this astonishing find in the Lincoln Log, a newsletter for buffs. Its circulation was minuscule compared with the slick magazines -- National Geographic or American Heritage -- that would have loved to showcase such a find and maybe make its discoverer famous. But Mr. Hall was without professional vanity; that's what it means to be an amateur, after all.

At the end of his life, Mr. Hall treated his vast archives with the same modesty and discretion. At least two well-endowed universities made a play for the contents of his file cabinets. Instead, he gave them to the small, homespun Surratt House museum, once the country home of the Lincoln conspirator Mary Surratt and a favorite gathering place for buffs. With a single stroke, he transformed the museum into the Alexandrian library of assassination studies. It was a gesture of confidence and fellow feeling, made to all amateur historians from the best of their kind.

For the full commentary, see: 

ANDREW FERGUSON.  "TASTE; A History Hobby."  The Wall Street Journal  (Fri., May 25, 2007):  W13.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

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The Wall Street Journal summarizes an April 2, 2007 article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic:

A new generation of economists has become so addicted to cleverness that dull but genuinely useful research is under threat.

"Freakonomics," the 2005 best seller that sought to explain the mysteries of everyday life through economics, is only partly to blame, writes Noam Scheiber. The deeper roots lie in a 1980s crisis of faith over economists' ability to reliably crunch numbers. Influential economist H. Gregg Lewis kicked it off by demonstrating that a host of broad, worthwhile empirical surveys of unions' impact on wages came to opposite conclusions, mostly thanks to the differing original assumptions by the studies' authors.

As a result, some economists retrenched, opting to focus on finding "solid answers to modest questions."

For the full summary, see:

"Informed Reader; Economics; How 'Freakonomics' Quashes Real Debates." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 28, 2007):  B11.

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Steven Johnson has a great passage on the contribution of the amateur in The Ghost Map story (see below).

This is a theme that resonates.  In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson makes the case for amateurs in astronomy.  (Is it he, who points out that the root of the word "amateur" is to love?)

Stigler had an important early paper in which he discusses the professionalization of the economics profession.  He praises the results, but what he presents provides some grist for the mill of criticism too.  For example, the exit of the amateurs, reduced the applicability of the work, and turned research more toward internal puzzle-solving, and model-building.

The web is a leveler in science, as suggested in an NBER paper.  Maybe the result will be a resurgence of amateurism, and maybe that won't be all bad.

(p. 202)  But Broad Street should be understood not just as the triumph of rogue science, but also, and just as important, as the triumph of a certain mode of engaged amateurism.  Snow himself was a kind of amateur.  He had no institutional role where cholera was concerned; his interest in the disease was closer to a hobby than a true vocation.  But Whitehead was an amateur par excellence.  He had no medical training, no background in public health.  His only credentials for solving the mystery behind London's most devastating outbreak of disease were his open and probing mind and his intimate knowledge of the community. 

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

(Note:  A probably relevant, much praised book, that I have never gotten around to reading, is Martin J.S. Rudwick's The Great Devonian Controversy:  The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists.)

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I remember George Stigler saying (I think in conversation with me, but maybe as an aside in a lecture), that at first he had been inclined to reject a paper for the JPE that empirically tested astrology.  His reason was that, while he liked what the authors were doing, he was not sure that what they were doing, most appropriately belonged in an economics journal.

But when the authors convinced him that they would not be able to publish it anywhere else, he changed his mind and published it.

The episode tells us something about Stigler, and something about scientific method.  About Stigler, the episode provides strong evidence of the importance that Stigler placed on evidence, relative to theory.

On scientific method, the episode can be taken as an illustration of Karl Popper's distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification.  There are many sources of hypotheses (the context of discovery).  Famously, Kepler's inspiration for the elliptical paths of planets, had a somewhat mystical source in the "perfect" solids.  But what makes a theory "scientific" is not its context of discovery, but its context of justification, viz., is the theory subjected to empirical test?

Hypotheses are not ruled out of science ab initio, but by being inconsistent with the evidence.  I agree with this view, which explains why I am a (passive) member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, which is devoted to the empirical testing of politically incorrect theories (such as UFOs, the Shroud of Turin, ESP, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.)

The JPE astrology article, accepted by Stigler as editor, was: 

Bennett, James T., and James R. Barth. "Astronomics: A New Approach to Economics?" Journal of Political Economy 81, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1973): 1473-75.

A more recent empirical test of an astrological hypothesis is:

Wong, Ka-Fu, and Linda Yung. "Do Dragons Have Better Fate?" Economic Inquiry 43, no. 3 (July 2005): 689-97.

For more on Popper's views of science, consult:

Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books, 1959.

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(p. 108)  It is worth pausing for a second to reflect on Snow's willingness to pursue his investigation this far.  Here we have a man who had reached the very pinnacle of Victorian medical practice---attending on the queen of England with a procedure that he himself had pioneered---who was nonetheless willing to spend every spare moment away from his practice knocking on hundreds of doors in some of London's most dangerous neighborhoods, seeking out specifically those houses that had been attacked by the most dread disease of the age.  But without that tenacity, without that fearlessness, without that readiness to leave behind the safety of professional success and royal patronage, and venture into the streets, his "grand experiment"---as Snow came to call it---would have gone nowhere.   The miasma theory would have remained unchallenged,

Source: 

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

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Johnson's wonderful book is part mystery, part history, part philosophy of science, and part musing on political philosophy.  The passage below warms the heart (and stimulates the brain) of the libertarian.  Against great odds, Dr. Snow persisted in presenting ever-more convincing evidence for his correct water-borne theory of cholera.  Meanwhile Chadwick, the main advocate of government public health activities, continued to direct policy on the basis of the mistaken theory that cholera was spread by foul vapors in the air. 

 

(p. 120) Herein lies the dominant irony of the state of British public health in the late 1840s.  Just as Snow was concocting his theory of cholera as a waterborne agent that had to be ingested to do harm, Chadwick was building an elaborate scheme that would deliver the cholera bacteria directly to the mouths of Londoners.  (A modern bioterrorist couldn't have come up with a more ingenious and far-reaching scheme.)  Sure enough, the cholera returned with a vengeance in 1848-1849, the rising death toll neatly following the Sewer Commission's cheerful data on the growing supply of waste deposited in the river.  By the end of the outbreak, nearly 15,000 Londoners would be dead.  The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.  (There is some precedent to Chadwick's folly, however.  During the plague years of 1665-1666, popular lore had it that the disease was being spread by dogs and cats.  The Lord Mayor promptly called for a mass extermination of the city's entire population of pets and strays, which was dutifully carried out by his minions.  Of course, the plague turned out to be (p. 121) transmitted via the rats, whose numbers grew exponentially after the sudden, state-sponsored demise of their only predators.)

Why would the authorities go to such lengths to destroy the Thames?  All the members of these various commissions were fully aware that the waste being flushed into the river was having disastrous effects on the quality of the water.  And they were equally aware that a significant percentage of the population was drinking the water.  Even without a waterborne theory of cholera's origin, it seems like madness to celebrate the ever-increasing tonnage of human excrement being flushed into the water supply.  And, indeed, it was a kind of madness, the madness that comes from being under the spell of a Theory.  If all smell was disease, if London's health crisis was entirely attributable to contaminated air, then any effort to rid the houses and streets of miasmatic vapors was worth the cost, even if it meant turning the Thames into a river of sewage.

Source: 

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

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   Source of book image:  http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/1591841380.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V37439749_.jpg

A new book is out on the wiki ("quick") phenomenon.  Chris Anderson has some stimulating comments on this phenomenon in his The Long Tail.  The Wikinomics book appears to be less profound, but may still be of interest.  (It appears to be a quick-read, management guru-jargon type book.)

The wiki issue that interests me is how wiki collaboration processes might substitute for rigorous editing and peer-review, as a way to get a lot of high-quality information out there fast.  (This is what Anderson claims, and the more I use the Wikipedia, the more plausible I find the claim.)

The reference to the book is:

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio, 2006.

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   Source of book image:  http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/11460000/11468284.jpg

I have not yet read The Ghost Map, but from the review excerpted below, it sounds like a wonderful book.  One lesson from the book appears to be that much good can come from a careful collection of evidence, and that much harm can come from sticking to a theory in spite of the evidence.  It is also interesting that in this tale, the villain turns out to be the advocate of public works, whose good intentions resulted in much death and suffering. 

 

(p. P8) The sociology of error is a wonderful subject. Some university ought to endow a chair in it -- and then make Steven Johnson the first professor. Mr. Johnson last provoked the public with his counterintuitive polemic "Everything Bad Is Good For You," in which he argued that TV and videogames actually improve our cognitive skills. In "The Ghost Map" he tells the story of how for 30 years and more the medical establishment in Victorian London refused to accept what was staring them in the face, namely that cholera was a waterborne disease.

Thousands of Londoners died while doctors and public-health officials stubbornly clung to the view that the plague was an airborne miasma that hung in the foul atmosphere of the slums and was inhaled by the wretched creatures who lived there. Every kind of cure was proposed: opium, linseed oil and hot compresses, smoke, castor oil, brandy -- everything but the simple, obvious remedy of rehydration, which reduces the otherwise fatal disease to a bad case of diarrhea.

The fact that the cholera toxin tricks the cells in the lining of the colon into expelling water at a terrifying rate (victims have been known to lose 30% of their body weight in a matter of hours) should surely have alerted someone to the possibility that putting this Niagara back into the body might be worth trying. Only one doctor, Thomas Latta, hit upon the answer, in 1832, just a few months after the first outbreak ever in Britain. His mistake was not to inject enough salty water, and his lone initiative was soon overwhelmed by the brainless babble of the quacks.

Chief among the villains of Mr. Johnson's unputdownable tale was the man whom we were brought up to revere as the father of public sanitation, Edwin Chadwick. This dour, tactless, unpopular reformer laid the foundations for all the government interventions in public health that we now take for granted. Yet in this story he labored under not one but two illusions that proved catastrophic.

. . .

With the austere teetotaller and vegetarian Dr. Snow and his devoted helper in the Soho slums, the Rev. Henry Whitehead, "The Ghost Map" gains not one but two heroes. Patiently they mapped the patterns of victims and survivors and narrowed down the most likely source of the cholera plague to the Broad Street pump. But even after the pump handle was removed so that Londoners could no longer fill their buckets there and the illness subsided, the miasmatists were not convinced. Snow then tramped the streets of Battersea and Vauxhall to demonstrate that those who had their water from higher up the Thames, above the reach of the tide, remained unharmed, while those who took it from the foul tidewater perished in the hundreds. This was no easy task, since the pattern of water pipes under London's houses was as tangled as the pattern of Internet service providers are today.

Why did it take so long? Because mapping epidemics was only in its infancy, though Snow's famous map was not quite the first. Because the questions that Chadwick's public-health board researched were self-fulfilling, all having to do with the smells and personal habits of the poor and not with the water they drank. The researchers mistook correlation for causation: Nobody died on the high ground of Hampstead, where the air was purer, therefore higher was safer -- or so it seemed until a Mrs. Eley, who had retired thither, arranged to receive a jugful of water from her beloved Broad Street pump and got cholera.

But above all Chadwick and his crew were certain of themselves because the stench of the slums was so utterly disgusting and because smell acts so powerfully on our imaginations. Only the most careful and dispassionate investigators were free of the obsession with stench. Henry Mayhew, for example, noted in his "London Labour and the London Poor" (1851) that sewer-hunters, who scavenged deep underground knee-deep in muck, lived to a ripe old age. The Great Stink of 1858, which finally persuaded the government to commission Sir Joseph Bazalgette to lay down the magnificent network of sewers that have lasted to this day, did not kill a single Londoner -- yet still Chadwick did not believe.

For the full review, see: 

FERDINAND MOUNT.  "BOOKS; Lost in a Time of Cholera; How a doctor's search solved the mystery of an epidemic in Victorian London."  The Wall Street Journal   (Sat., October 21, 2006):  P8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

The reference to the book is:

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.  299 pages, $26.95

   Dr. John Snow.  Source of photo:  online version of the WSJ article cited above.

   Edwin Chadwick.  Source of photo:  online version of the WSJ article cited above.

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Based on the Viking tests, astronomers concluded that there probably was no life on Mars.  Begley (2006) documents the recent research showing that applying the Viking tests to earth, results in the conclusion that there is no life on earth, either.  Once again, Feynman was way ahead of his time:

(p. 204)  We like to sit down and talk about how different things could be from what we expected; take the Viking landers on Mars, for example, we were trying to think how many ways there could be life that they couldn't find with that equipment. 

 

Source: 

Feynman, Richard P. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Perseus Books, 1999.

(Note:  italics in original.)

The reference on the Begley article:

Begley, Sharon. "Science Journal; Scientists Revisit Data on Mars with Minds More Open to 'Life'." The Wall Street Journal  (Fri., October 27, 2006):  B1.

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   Source of book image:  http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=689539

Physicists rightly feel uneasy about descriptions of the physical world that divide it into discrete clusters of equations and axioms, each cluster explaining one part of existence but not another.  Better would be finding a Theory of Everything capable of conjoining, in a few equations, planet-pulling gravitation and the microcosmic weirdness that goes on in the quantum world of atoms and particles.  Physicists would like to stitch time and space together as well.

Einstein tried and failed.  In recent years, "string theory" has been the favored means of attempting to tie everything together, but it has unraveled into mathematical frippery, positing ever more intricate elaborations extending into anywhere from 10 to 26 dimensions, some arising from themselves, some hidden in ways so baroquely scrolled that you can get a migraine just thinking about thinking about them.  Little wonder that, as an experimental science, string theory seems to have nowhere to go.

That is the problem that Lee Smolin identifies in "The Trouble With Physics."  He laments a kind of sociological imperative drawing the best minds into a whirlpool of mathematical solipsism.

For the full review, see:

RUSSELL SEITZ.  "BOOKS; Untangling the Knots in String Theory."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., December 2, 2006):  P9.

The reference to the book under review, is: 

Lee Smolin.  The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next.  Houghton Mifflin, 2006.  (392 pages, $26)

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  Source of book image:  http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0738203491.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

In his elegant and thoughtful foreward, physicist, futurist, and guru Freeman Dyson writes:

(p. viii)  Before I met Feynman, I had published a number of mathematical papers, full of clever tricks but totally lacking in im-(p. ix)portance.  When I met Feynman, I knew at once that I had entered another world.  He was not interested in publishing pretty papers.  He was struggling, more intensely than I had ever seen anyone struggle, to understand the workings of nature by rebuilding physics from the bottom up.   

The reference to the book, is:

Feynman, Richard P. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Perseus Books, 1999.