"There is a complex economic chain between the rich lifestyles of developed countries and the hard work of Chinese peasants who are trying to survive. At the two ends of the chain, neither party understands the other."
“Many times I was in tears at all this misery ... If you were on this train with hundreds of migrants around us — it stinks, it’s dirty and everyone’s trying to survive, just to see their kids.”
NYTimes: The human genome is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years — the genome’s equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk.
Some of those genes, surprised geneticists reported Thursday, can rise from the dead like zombies, waking up to cause one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy. This is the first time, geneticists say, that they have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease.
... As they studied the repeated, but dead, gene, Dr. Tapscott and his colleagues realized that it was not completely inactive. It is always transcribed — copied by the cell as a first step to making a protein. But the transcriptions were faulty, disintegrating right away. They were missing a crucial section, called a poly (A) sequence, needed to stabilize them.
When a mutation added back this sequence, the dead gene came back to life. “It’s an if and only if,” Dr. Housman said. “You have to have 10 copies or fewer. And you have to have poly (A). Either one is not enough.”
But why would people be protected if they have more than 10 copies of the dead gene? Researchers say that those extra copies change the chromosome’s structure, shutting off the whole region so it cannot be used. ...
IBTimes: ... While "Asians" -- defined broadly as people who can trace their ancestry to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Pacific Islands -- account for only about 5 percent of the U.S. populace, they are believed to represent up to 20 percent of the enrollment at the top Ivy League schools.
However, the irony is that if the admission criteria and process in all U.S. universities were completely fair and equitable -- that is, based purely on academic qualifications -- the Asian weighting in the elite colleges would likely be significantly higher.
... Consider what happened in California -- a state with a very high Asian population of about 13 percent -- in late 1996. Voters passed Proposition 209, a referendum that essentially revoked Affirmative Action measures and deemed that entry into public colleges -- including the huge University of California (UC) system -- should be entirely race-blind.
"A direct consequence of this was that the percentage of Asian-Americans at universities like Berkeley, UC-Irvine, and UCLA immediately skyrocketed," said Stephen D.H. Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon in Eugene. "At those institutions, the Asian-American representation currently approaches 50 percent."
... The word "quota" is controversial and politically-charged; one must be careful when using it. However it's difficult not to conclude that some elite universities do indeed impose a quota -- officially or subconsciously -- upon Asian enrollment in order to control their numbers at some specified levels.
Consider a recent study undertaken by Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist. He calculated that in 1997 African-Americans who achieved scores of 1150 scores on two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges as whites who scored in the 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s.
Or put it another way, Asian applicants typically need to score an extra 140 or so points on their SATs to compete "equally" with white students.
Miller of Babson College also wrote that "most elite universities appear determined to keep their Asian American totals in a narrow range. Yale's class of 2013 is 15.5 percent Asian American, compared with 16.1 percent at Dartmouth, 19.1 percent at Harvard and 17.6 percent at Princeton."
However, white students are similarly victimized by admission policies at some elite schools.
Espenshade discovered that when comparing applicants with similar grades, scores, athletic qualifications, and family history for seven elite private colleges and universities: whites were three times as likely to get accepted as Asians; Hispanics were twice as likely to win admission as whites, and African-Americans were at least five times as likely to be accepted as whites.
Moreover, if all elite private universities enacted race-blind admissions, the percentage of Asian students would jump from 24 percent to 39 percent (similar to what they already are now at Caltech and Berkeley, two elite institutions with race-blind admissions; the former due to a belief in meritocracy, the latter due to Proposition 209).
What Asian-Americans are enduring now is reminiscent of the travails of American Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, when colleges like Harvard and Yale imposed quotas to limit their numbers at these elite institutions. And like many of those Jews from seven or eight decades ago, numerous Asian-American students today come from poor, humble immigrant households.
Warning: Physics Envy May be Hazardous to Your Wealth!
The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics, physics envy has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases. We speculate on the origins of physics envy, and then describe an alternate perspective of economic behavior based on a new taxonomy of uncertainty. We illustrate the relevance of this taxonomy with two concrete examples: the classical harmonic oscillator with some new twists that make physics look more like economics, and a quantitative equity market-neutral strategy. We conclude by offering a new interpretation of tail events, proposing an uncertainty checklist with which our taxonomy can be implemented, and considering the role that quants played in the current financial crisis.
Asymptotic Safety, Singularities, and Gravitational Collapse
Roberto Casadio, Stephen D.H. Hsu, Behrouz Mirza
Asymptotic safety (an ultraviolet fixed point with finite-dimensional critical surface) offers the possibility that a predictive theory of quantum gravity can be obtained from the quantization of classical general relativity. However, it is unclear what becomes of the singularities of classical general relativity, which, it is hoped, might be resolved by quantum effects. We study dust collapse with a running gravitational coupling and find that a future singularity can be avoided if the coupling becomes exactly zero at some finite energy scale. The singularity can also be avoided (pushed off to infinite proper time) if the coupling approaches zero sufficiently rapidly at high energies. However, the evolution deduced from perturbation theory still implies a singularity at finite proper time.
Summary: ... According to Hasegawa, Japanese leaders' diaries and testimonies suggest that the imminent Soviet invasion was more influential in compelling them to accept the Potsdam conditions. Although Emperor Hirohito's desire to end the war became more urgent after Hiroshima, only on August 9 after the Soviet declaration of war did he clearly say that "it is necessary to study and decide on the termination of the war" [26]. The other peace advocates in the Foreign Ministry on the same day began to urge acceptance of the Potsdam ultimatum [27]. The reactions of the more hawkish military officials seem to have been similar. Both Admiral Toyoda and Army Deputy Chief of Staff Kawabe were surprised at the news of Hiroshima but were not ready to temper their views on continuing the war [28]. Many military officials hoped to mount a final defense, but had counted on Soviet neutrality in order to do so [29]. The Soviet declaration of war destroyed those hopes, and severely weakened the war faction's leverage within the government.
The major strength of Hasegawa's work, and one reason for its new arguments, is its in-depth analysis of Japanese primary sources. Few previous historians in the US had consulted the personal writings of figures like Toyoda, Kawabe, and Tanemura. But Hasegawa also makes more extensive use of Allied primary sources, including the memoirs and diaries of Truman, Byrnes, Brown, and others, which play a key role in his argument about the intent of the Potsdam Proclamation. Hasegawa's careful scholarship has significantly enriched our understanding of the intentions behind the demand for "unconditional surrender," as well as the dynamics behind the Japanese decision to surrender.
Snow: I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, Have you noticed how the word "intellectual" is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me? It does seem rather odd, don't y'know.
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
Kagan: The birth of this manuscript was the need for a summer writing project married to the accidental spotting of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures near the shelf where I was searching for a book in Harvard’s Widener Library. After reading Snow’s 1959 essay the following weekend, it became clear that revisiting Snow’s thesis 50 years later allowed me to organize my thoughts about the state of scholarship in the American academy and to synthesize my unhappiness with the dramatic ascent of the natural sciences in the years following World War 2, which intimidated the other two scholarly communities.
A deep theme in The Three Cultures centers on the different meanings of truth; that is, what does an individual point to when he or she declares, “I believe that idea to be true.” The correspondence between a statement and a reliable observation is the usual meaning of truth for both scientists and the public. However, mathematicians and some physicists accept the logical consistency of a mathematical argument as a second, different definition. The physicists who call themselves string theorists believe that their equations are true, even though many phenomena assumed by the equations have never been observed.
Many humanists accept the semantic coherence of a text and its correspondence with the readers’ intuitions as a related, but distinctive, definition. Readers of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice or Richard Dawkins’s book on selfish genes regard the texts as capturing the truth, even though many statements lack correspondence with observations and do not use formal arguments. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real have the ring of truth for those whose semantic networks are in accord with those of the authors.
The related concept of “ethically right” belongs to another meaning network that shares the semantic node correct with the concept true. All who are certain that no human should harm or torture an innocent are convinced of the correctness of this belief which, unlike truth, involves a contrast between good and bad.
The final chapter of The Three Cultures is penetrated with personal ethical evaluations of the changes in the ambience of the research university, including the epidemic of a naked seeking of celebrity, the erosion of faculty loyalty to the university or the student body, the surrender by both administration and faculty to the seduction of political correctness, and the faculty acquiescence to demands to account for their time, to publish enough papers to announce that they possess a work ethic and, if possible, to bring overhead money to the college treasurer. Alfred North Whitehead, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Marie Curie would have been puzzled by this new breed of academic scholar.
Vanity Fair: ... I had become a member a few weeks earlier, partly as a social experiment and partly out of genuine desperation. I was frustrated with my job, which offered little upward mobility, and was thinking about quitting it to pursue my goal of becoming a full-time freelance writer. Holding me back were my lack of savings and my fear of sacrificing a regular paycheck. If I had a hefty allowance from a generous benefactor, though, I figured that I could take the leap comfortably.
... The site, which launched in 2006, has about 420,000 members, of which roughly one-third are sugar daddies and two-thirds are sugar babies (sugar mommies account for less than one percent). While sugar daddies pay $49.95 per month for a premium membership (or $1,200 a month for Diamond Club certification, which requires verification of one’s net worth through tax-return data), as a sugar baby I was able to join for free. I uploaded two photos and listed some general information about myself, and I stated “open, amount negotiable” in the space that asks what you’re looking for. (Seeking Arrangement skirts the issue of prostitution by promoting the exchange of “intimacy and companionship” for “gifts.”) I took a deep breath and posted my profile, determined to focus on New York–based single men claiming to be worth at least $10 million.
... When Charlie—divorced, late 50s, worth about $50 million—asked to meet me, I tried to remain hopeful. I sauntered into the Mercer Hotel in jeans and a gray cardigan one frigid Sunday morning, scouring the crowd for a tall, gray-haired man. He spotted me first and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Here you go—just a token,” Charlie said, extending his hand.
I examined my gift—an iPod—and said, “Thank you,” determining to be extra pleasant during brunch.
We both ordered eggs, and by the time our food arrived I had grown to like Charlie. For starters, he provided an earnest explanation for joining Seeking Arrangement.
“I can’t separate the fact that I have resources from who I am,” he said. “It’s part of me. And it’s something I have to offer twentysomethings.”
“I completely agree.”
“I married young, you know. And I remained married for nearly 30 years while I was raising my kids.”
“How old are they?”
He chuckled before admitting, “It’s kind of weird. They’re your age.”
“It’s not weird at all,” I said.
Charlie turned to Seeking Arrangement, he explained, because most of the women he had been meeting wanted to settle down. “I don’t want another family,” he said.
“I promise you I’m not in the market for one,” I told him, and then asked, “Have you ever done this before?”
“I’ve never been in one of these relationships, exactly. But I’ve certainly been generous with previous girlfriends. And since joining the site, I’ve been on a few coffee dates. Pretty positive experiences, actually. I met an editor for a fashion periodical, a translator for the U.N., and a girl whose dad”—he stopped to laugh—“whose biological dad had just cut her off. The only negative experience I had was with a girl who was dating a hedge-funder. She said he had given her her nose and her Birkin bag, but that she needed cash. A bit mercenary for my taste.”
[About 1 hour into the podcast. Discusses flash memory, blue diodes, flat screen displays.]
... All I can tell you is that this is playing out now and we'll see. ... Maybe it's true you can do without all that manufacturing capability. However, this is not what we are talking about. What we are talking about is innovation and American innovation. I think American innovation is not nearly as great as the proponents say it is. Because they are not telling the truth.
Laughlin Nobel biography: ... A few days after the Nobel Prize announcement I got the following wonderful e-mail from Andrew Tikofsky, one of my best graduate students, who is now on Wall Street:
Hi Bob, Ian McDonald, Steve Strong, and I are getting together for a beer near Grand Central Station this coming Tuesday in honor of your prize. You are cordially invited to attend.
1528 California children with IQs of 140 or higher were followed into adulthood in order to assess the importance of IQ in adult success and adjustment. The mean IQ of those that married and had children was 152; that of their spouses, 125. The mean IQ of this whole group of parents was 138.5. The mean IQ of 1571 of their children was 133.2, a little less than the parents and showing some regression to the mean.
Figure 3 caption: Ordinary matter (star, galactic core, etc.) collapses to form an astrophysical black hole. Under unitary evolution, the number of final Hawking radiation states that are actually accessible from this collapse is $\sim \exp M^{3/2}$, i.e.~precisely the number of ordinary astrophysical precursors (\ref{th1}). It is therefore much smaller than the the number of $\sim \exp M^2$ states a black hole, and its eventual Hawking radiation, could possibly occupy if nothing about its formation process were known.
A. The "white hole" I analyzed is just a classical background which is the time reversal of (part of) a black hole spacetime. The initial data for this spacetime can be obtained from a spacelike slice across the usual black hole spacetime ("after" the horizon has formed), and need not include the singularity.
B. I imposed the condition of isolation (vacuum) outside the white hole at early times. This is equivalent to requiring no radiation in the future of the original black hole spacetime. An unusual boundary condition, but corresponds to the "isolated" white hole I was interested in investigating.
C. I used Hawking's method (i.e., Bogoliubov transformation of in- and out- modes) to study the future behavior of the white hole, or, equivalently, the initial preparation of the black hole required to prevent it from radiating.
1. We know from string theory that black holes and white holes are the same thing. Well, let me first point out that not everyone believes in string theory as the correct theory of quantum gravity (i.e., describing our universe) at 99.9 percent confidence level. Secondly, if a semi-classical calculation like mine suggests differences between the behavior of an isolated white hole and an isolated black hole, isn't it interesting to reconcile that with what AdS/CFT predicts? Although I am not an expert on AdS/CFT I suspect that the time reversal invariance of the CFT boundary state only implies time reversal of the entire bulk state (i.e., on an entire spacelike slice) and not of the black hole alone. If so, there is no contradiction with my results -- see above. Perhaps someone can clarify this for me?
2. Hawking clearly said the same in his 1976 paper. That was my impression on first reading, but since all of his arguments center on the case of a black hole in equilibrium with a bath at equal temperature, it is unclear (at least to me) how this can be generalized to an isolated white hole. That was one motivation for my investigation.
3. Entropic arguments imply that white holes (as obtained via (A) above) are extremely unlikely: specifically, a highly entropic white hole should not explode into lower entropy ejecta. I understand the argument but don't place as much confidence in it as Lubos does. The uncertainty is not about the 2nd Law but about the interpretation of black or white hole entropy.
Lubos does not want me to consider classical spacetimes generated by the initial data obtained in (A) above. Even if one accepts that such spacetimes are highly improbable, that does not mean that they shouldn't be studied. (For example, if you are a many worlder there are some branches on which exploding white holes are observed!) Apparently it is in bad taste to think about (exploding) white holes, but perhaps Lubos should tell this to, e.g., Frolov and Novikov.
