White holes and eternal black holes

New paper! I got interested in this topic because I realized that I didn't understand the quantum aspects of white holes -- i.e., what is the time-reversed equivalent of Hawking radiation (or lack thereof)?

arXiv:1007.2934

Title: White holes and eternal black holes
Authors: Stephen D.H. Hsu
Categories: gr-qc hep-ph hep-th

We investigate isolated white holes surrounded by vacuum, which correspond to the time reversal of eternal black holes that do not evaporate. We show that isolated white holes explode into quasi-thermal radiation.

Here is a figure from the paper:



Caption: A white hole spacetime. We impose the condition that past null infinity $\cal{J}_-^{\rm wh}$ is in the vacuum state -- there is no incoming radiation from the far past. The dotted black line is the initial singularity, and the dashed blue line is the path of a null ray on the anti-horizon. The curved line indicates matter which explodes out of the hole. The dashed black lines refer to modes discussed in the text, which we can think of as originating from the white hole, its ejecta, or from the past, $\cal{J}_-^{\rm wh}$.

Social Darwinism: 21st century edition

This is a nice summary of economic historian Gregory Clark's views on recent human evolution. See related posts. I think one standard deviation of change in population averages is possible over 1000 years, given plausible values of heritability and correlation between reproductive success and quantitative trait values.

Clark makes a good case (please follow the link and read the paper!). Will modern research rehabilitate the old Social Darwinist ideas of the 19th century?

The Domestication of Man: The Social Implications of Darwin

... Until recently, however, the one creature in the modern farmyard that was believed to be unchanged from Paleolithic times was man himself. We are assumed to still remain in our original wild form. “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind”1. For humans the Darwinian era was presumed to have ended with the Neolithic Revolution. Based on ethnographies of modern forager societies, at the dawn of the settled agrarian era people were impulsive, violent, innumerate, and lazy. Abstract reasoning abilities were limited. If we are biologically identical with these populations then only the thin patina of civilization separates us from the underlying violence and impulsivity of human nature. Scratch away that restraint and we would revert to our natural passions.

In my recent book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World I argue two things. First that all societies remained in a state I label the “Malthusian economy” up until the onset of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. In that state crucially the economic laws governing all human societies before 1800 were those that govern all animal societies. Second that was thus subject to natural selection throughout the Malthusian era, even after the arrival of settled agrarian societies with the Neolithic Revolution.

The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution but continued right up until the Industrial Revolution. But the arrival of settled agriculture and stable property rights set natural selection on a very different course. It created an accelerated period of evolution, rewarding with reproductive success a new repertoire of human behaviors – patience, self-control, passivity, and hard work – which consequently spread widely.

And we see in England, from at least 1250, that the kind of people who succeeded in the economic system – who accumulated assets, got skills, got literacy – increased their representation in each generation. Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world. Modern people are thus in part a creation of the market economies that emerged with the Neolithic Revolution. Just as people shaped economies, the pre-industrial economy shaped people. This has left the people of long settled agrarian societies substantially different now from our hunter gatherer ancestors, in terms of culture, and likely also in terms of biology. We are also presumably equivalently different from groups like Australian Aboriginals that never experience the Neolithic Revolution before the arrival of the English settlers in 1788.

The argument here thus unites the doctrines of Malthus and Darwin in studying human history. This is intellectually satisfying since Charles Darwin himself proclaimed his inspiration for On the Origin of Species was Malthus’s On a Principle of Population. ...

Max the METs

According to this study regular exercise does not entirely counteract the negative health effects of a sedentary lifestyle. There is an independent benefit from low-level activity throughout the day. That is, risk of heart problems is a function of two (exercise-related) parameters:

1. whether you work out
2. your baseline level of activity.

Remind me to do a few burpees in between every article or calculation! A treadmill in the office isn't a bad idea... :-)

NYTimes: ... In a study published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they reported that, to no one’s surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Most of us have heard that sitting is unhealthy. But many of us also have discounted the warnings, since we spend our lunch hours conscientiously visiting the gym. We consider ourselves sufficiently active. But then we drive back to the office, settle at our desks and sit for the rest of the day. We are, in a phrase adopted by physiologists, ‘‘active couch potatoes.’’

... adults spend more than nine hours a day in oxymoronic ‘‘sedentary activities.’’ For studies like these, scientists categorize activities by the number of METs they demand. A MET, or metabolic equivalent of task, is a measure of energy, with one MET being the amount of energy you burn lying down for one minute. Sedentary behaviors demand one to one and a half METs, or very little exertion.

Decades ago, before the advent of computers, plasma TVs and Roombas, people spent more time completing ‘‘light-intensity activities,’’ which require between one and a half and three METs. Most ‘‘home activities,’’ like mopping, cooking and changing light bulbs, demand between two and three METs. (One exception is ‘‘butchering animals,’’ a six-MET activity, according to a bogglingly comprehensive compilation from 2000 of the METs associated with different activities.) Nowadays, few of us accumulate much light-intensity activity. We’ve replaced those hours with sitting.

The physiological consequences are only slowly being untangled. In a number of recent animal studies, when rats or mice were not allowed to amble normally around in their cages, they rapidly developed unhealthy cellular changes in their muscles. The animals showed signs of insulin resistance and had higher levels of fatty acids in their blood. Scientists believe the changes are caused by a lack of muscular contractions. If you sit for long hours, you experience no ‘‘isometric contraction of the antigravity (postural) muscles,’’ according to an overview of the consequences of inactivity published this month in Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews. Your muscles, unused for hours at a time, change in subtle fashion, and as a result, your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases can rise.

Regular workout sessions do not appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting. ...

One MET for a 180 pound male is just over 80 calories per hour, or about 2000 calories per day. Walking is 3-4 METs and doing light work is 1-3 METs. I guess that means on those long travel days I'm burning hundreds of extra calories by walking through airports, standing in line, and staying awake for 24 hours.

More perils of precocity

Driving the kids to preschool this morning.

I: "Daddy, does everybody see the same sun?"

M: "If it's day here, is it night in China?"

A short lecture on the earth-sun geometry and rotation of the earth ensues.

I: "But daddy, if the earth is spinning why don't all of these cars fall off?"

BGI: Beijing Genomics Institute

In an earlier post I mentioned BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute, now located in Shenzhen). Below are some excerpts from a Nature article about the Institute, which is funded by a $1.5 billion dollar (!) loan from the China Development Bank.

Some of the researchers at BGI are very young -- the article profiles two who are in their early 20s and already have significant responsibility. Is this really so strange? After all, people who lead teams at startups or at Google or FaceBook, developing key infrastructure, are often not much older.

Nature even ran an editorial about this: Do scientists really need a PhD? Bioinformatics is a good field to try this in as it is computing intensive (even youngsters can produce good code) and a relatively new field (the background genetics and statistics can be taught fairly quickly to smart kids). On the opposite end of the spectrum: particle or string theory, in which even supersmart kids will barely have their footing after 3-5 years of post-BA work. The contrast between fields in which people can quickly get started in research, versus those that have a steep learning curve and lots of accumulated depth, makes for constant misunderstandings and debates over how graduate education should be structured.

Below are pictures of BGI's director and two of the young researchers.

Nature: In 2006, Li Yingrui left Peking University for the BGI, China's premier genome-sequencing institute. Now, freckled and fresh-faced at 23 years old, he baulks at the way a senior BGI colleague characterized his college career — saying Li was wasting time playing video games and sleeping during class. "I didn't sleep in lectures," Li says. "I just didn't go."

He runs a team of 130 bioinformaticians, most no older than himself. His love of games has served him well when deciphering the flood of data spilling out of the BGI's sequencers every day. But "science is more satisfying" than video games, he says. "There's more passion."

The people at the BGI — which stopped officially using the name Beijing Genomics Institute in 2007 after moving its headquarters to Shenzhen — brim with passion, and an ambition so naked that it unsettles some. In the past few years the institute has leapt to the forefront of genome sequencing with a bevy of papers in top-tier journals. Some recent achievements include the genomes of the cucumber1, the giant panda2, the first complete sequence of an ancient human3 and, in this issue of Nature4, the genomes of more than 1,000 species of gut bacteria, compiled from 577 billion base pairs of sequence data.

The mission, BGI staff say with an almost rehearsed uniformity, is to prove that genomics matters to ordinary people. "The whole institute feels this huge responsibility," says Wang Jun, executive director of the BGI and a professor at the University of Copenhagen. The strategy is to sequence — well, pretty much anything that the BGI or its expanding list of collaborators wants to sequence (see 'Mass production'). It has launched projects to tackle 10,000 microbial genomes and those of 1,000 plants and animals as part of an effort to create a genomic tree of life covering the major evolutionary branches. Important species, such as rice, will be sequenced 100 times over, and for humans there seems no limit to the number the institute would like sequenced.

To fulfil that mission, the BGI is transforming itself into a genomics factory, producing cheap, high-quality sequence with an army of young bioinformaticians and a growing arsenal of expensive equipment. In January, the BGI announced the purchase of 128 of the world's newest, fastest sequencers, the HiSeq 2000 from Illumina, each of which can produce 25 billion base pairs of sequence in a day. When all are running at full tilt, the BGI could theoretically sequence more than 10,000 human genomes in a year. This puts it on track to surpass the entire sequencing output of the United States, says David Wheeler, director of the Molecular Biology Computational Resource at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "It is clear there is a new map of the genomics world," he says.

The charge that the BGI has reduced science to brute mechanization does little to ruffle feathers in Shenzhen. Wang himself quips that the BGI brings little intellectual capital into projects: "We are the muscle, we have no brain." But such comments belie a quiet confidence, in everyone from the BGI's seasoned management to its youngest recruits, that they can make an impact not just to the balance of sequencing power but also in biology, medicine and agriculture. This will be a challenge given the significant loans taken out to expand capacity. Torn between scientific and financial goals, even its founder can't seem to decide whether the BGI is a business or a non-profit research institute. Genome scientists around the world are watching to see how it will strike a balance.

... With this breathing room, the BGI has grown to employ 1,500 people nationwide, more than two-thirds of them in Shenzhen, and this is expected to jump to 3,500 by the end of the year. With the investment in new sequencers, provided by a 10-billion-renminbi loan from the China Development Bank, the BGI's capacity will grow, but so will costs.

... The BGI's Luo Ruibang, also a student at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, turned 21 while at his last scientific meeting. He says he's had trouble convincing other scientists that, lacking doctoral training, he can do top-notch science. "A lot of the foreigners wonder if I'm really capable," he says. Luo and Li were co-first authors on a paper9 describing the discovery of large DNA segments in the Asian and African genomes that are absent in the Caucasian genome.

Li and his bosses are confident that this youth brigade can piece together and verify sequences. "It is a new field," says Wang. "There is not much experience anyway." But interpreting data and designing experiments are two different things, and BGI staff admit a dearth of knowledge in the latter. "We don't know much about biology," Li says. Liu says the BGI needs to overcome its biological blindspot, but he is supportive of its mission. "They are primarily sequencers, but smart ones with big guns," he says.

... Research alone is not going to pay back the 10-billion renminbi bank loan. The BGI makes some income from collaborations, which account for 40% of the sequencing workload. Outsourced sequencing services for universities, breeding companies or pharmaceutical companies bring in higher margins and account for another 55% of the workload (the final 5% is the BGI's own projects). In 2009, the BGI pulled in 300 million renminbi in revenue. That is not enough, says BGI marketing director Hongsheng Liang. In 2010, Liang hopes to pull in 1.2 billion renminbi.

New income could come from proprietary rights to agricultural applications. The BGI, which owns more than 200 patents, has been attempting to do genomics-based breeding with foxtail millet in Hebei and has other agricultural projects in Laos. More cash could come from expansion of services overseas. Within three years, the institute plans to open offices in Copenhagen and San Francisco. The BGI may also charge for access to its Yanhuang database, a project launched in 2008 to sequence the genomes of 100 Chinese; BGI scientists say they would like to expand this number into the thousands. Although according to Yang, it would be charging "at cost" — to cover computational expenses and maintenance, not for the data. ...

Beyond Bayes: causality vs correlation

A draft paper by Harvard graduate student James Lee (student of Steve Pinker; I'd love to post the paper here but don't know yet if that's OK) got me interested in the work of statistical learning pioneer Judea Pearl. I found the essay Bayesianism and Causality, or, why I am only a half-Bayesian (excerpted below) a concise, and provocative, introduction to his ideas.

Pearl is correct to say that humans think in terms of causal models, rather than in terms of correlation. Our brains favor simple, linear narratives. The effectiveness of physics is a consequence of the fact that descriptions of natural phenomena are compressible into simple causal models. (Or, perhaps it just looks that way to us ;-)

Judea Pearl: I turned Bayesian in 1971, as soon as I began reading Savage’s monograph The Foundations of Statistical Inference [Savage, 1962]. The arguments were unassailable: (i) It is plain silly to ignore what we know, (ii) It is natural and useful to cast what we know in the language of probabilities, and (iii) If our subjective probabilities are erroneous, their impact will get washed out in due time, as the number of observations increases.

Thirty years later, I am still a devout Bayesian in the sense of (i), but I now doubt the wisdom of (ii) and I know that, in general, (iii) is false. Like most Bayesians, I believe that the knowledge we carry in our skulls, be its origin experience, schooling or hearsay, is an invaluable resource in all human activity, and that combining this knowledge with empirical data is the key to scientific enquiry and intelligent behavior. Thus, in this broad sense, I am a still Bayesian. However, in order to be combined with data, our knowledge must first be cast in some formal language, and what I have come to realize in the past ten years is that the language of probability is not suitable for the task; the bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships. Specifically, the building blocks of our scientific and everyday knowledge are elementary facts such as “mud does not cause rain” and “symptoms do not cause disease” and those facts, strangely enough, cannot be expressed in the vocabulary of probability calculus. It is for this reason that I consider myself only a half-Bayesian. ...

New Books in History

This is a consistently good podcast in which historian Marshall Poe (University of Iowa) conducts in-depth (usually an hour or so) discussions with other historians about their recent books. One of the things I enjoy about each podcast is that the author is invited to give a brief precis of their education and intellectual history. You can find it on iTunes or here.


Some specific recommendations:

Jerry Muller, Capitalism and the Jews

Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre

P. Bingham and J. Souza, Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe

Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History

Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, Natural Experiments of History

Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice

Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young, Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars

Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich

Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile

James Banner, Jr. and John Gillis, Becoming Historians

Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II

James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War

Gregory Cochran, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (To Poe's credit, his head did not explode during this interview.)

Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

There are many more, but that's probably enough for now. I listen to these at the gym or while running or in the car. In case Marshall Poe reads this, thanks for many stimulating and enjoyable hours.

Chown interview

A nice discussion with Marcus Chown on Bloggingheads. You can get a podcast version as well (iTunes). I wrote about his new book here.

Andy Grove on jobs, manufacturing and startups

Sorry for the lack of posts. I am traveling in Canada at the moment. Here's a photo from Mount Tremblant (near Montreal):



This essay by Andy Grove was recommended by commenter LondonYoung, and I thought I'd post an excerpt here. (LY, greetings from 4 techers!)

Bloomberg: Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.

Not this time. I left the restaurant unsettled. Something didn’t add up. Bay Area unemployment is even higher than the 9.7 percent national average. Clearly, the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn’t been creating many jobs of late -- unless you are counting Asia, where American technology companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.

The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Mythical Moment

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.

...

U.S. Versus China

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers -- factory employees, engineers and managers.

The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp.

10-to-1 Ratio

Until a recent spate of suicides at Foxconn’s giant factory complex in Shenzhen, China, few Americans had heard of the company. But most know the products it makes: computers for Dell and HP, Nokia Oyj cell phones, Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles, Intel motherboards, and countless other familiar gadgets. Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. -- that means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology, and other U.S. tech companies.

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular -- masking our greater and greater spending to create each position.

Tragic Mistake

Should we wait and not act on the basis of early indicators? I think that would be a tragic mistake because the only chance we have to reverse the deterioration is if we act early and decisively.

Already the decline has been marked. It may be measured by way of a simple calculation: an estimate of the employment cost- effectiveness of a company. First, take the initial investment plus the investment during a company’s IPO. Then divide that by the number of employees working in that company 10 years later. For Intel, this worked out to be about $650 per job -- $3,600 adjusted for inflation. National Semiconductor Corp., another chip company, was even more efficient at $2,000 per job.

Making the same calculations for a number of Silicon Valley companies shows that the cost of creating U.S. jobs grew from a few thousand dollars per position in the early years to $100,000 today. The obvious reason: Companies simply hire fewer employees as more work is done by outside contractors, usually in Asia.

Alternative Energy

The job-machine breakdown isn’t just in computers. Consider alternative energy, an emerging industry where there is plenty of innovation. Photovoltaics, for example, are a U.S. invention. Their use in home-energy applications was also pioneered by the U.S.

Last year, I decided to do my bit for energy conservation and set out to equip my house with solar power. My wife and I talked with four local solar firms. As part of our due diligence, I checked where they get their photovoltaic panels -- the key part of the system. All the panels they use come from China. A Silicon Valley company sells equipment used to manufacture photo-active films. They ship close to 10 times more machines to China than to manufacturers in the U.S., and this gap is growing. Not surprisingly, U.S. employment in the making of photovoltaic films and panels is perhaps 10,000 -- just a few percent of estimated worldwide employment.

Advanced Batteries

There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up. ...

Comments on this essay from Tyler Cowen (via Dave Backus). Groves' conclusions may be suspect, but the facts he describes are nevertheless very interesting.

Singapore from below

I recently came across the blog A Singapore Taxi Driver's Diary, which gives a unique perspective on the squeaky clean city-state of Singapore. It's not surprising that a former scientist who speaks Mandarin and English would have interesting stories to tell after driving a cab for a while.

Probably the only taxi driver in this world with a PhD from Stanford and a proven track record of scientific accomplishments, I have been forced out of my research job at the height of my scientific career, and unable to find another one, for reasons I can only describe as something "uniquely Singapore". As a result, I am driving taxi to make a living and writing these real life stories just to make the dull job a little more interesting. I hope that these stories are interesting to you too.

...

Preface

Since the takeover of leadership by some western “big shots” a few years ago, the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) of ASTAR, Singapore, a place I have worked for 16 years as a PI (principal investigator), a place that was once flourishing, promising, and pleasant to work in, has been in a mess. Bestowed with the kind of power they had never seen before, these once reputable scientists turned everything in the institute upside down. The previous democratic and consensus-oriented management system that had worked well for more than a decade in the past was thrown out of window and replaced by one that was marked by domineering, manipulation, and incompetence. What they lacked in experience of management, adequate understanding of the institute, and proper respect for fellow scientists as their colleagues, they made up for in arrogance, prejudice, and naked muscle of political power. Some PIs were sent packing, and some were promoted, all up to the new leadership’s manipulative and twisted standards. Despite my considerable contribution to building up this place into what it is today, I was among the first few PIs to be told to go. My employment contract with IMCB was terminated by May, 2008, without any forms of compensation given.

I was hence forced into a deeply difficult position. Becoming jobless at my age is perhaps the worst nightmare that can happen to any ordinary man, not to mention the loss of life-long career. ...

Some good examples: Driving Miss Edgy, Indecent Proposal, Out of Innocence.

If you like these stories, you might also like my 1997 travelogue on Thailand and Japan.

I discovered the Singapore taxi driver via Kaleidoscope, the blog of a theoretical physics student in India.

Financiers: make good!

For those on the Dark Side, please consider the job opportunity below, which might allow you to use your superpowers for Good :-)

In the words of Martin Sheen (Bud Fox's father in the movie Wall Street): "Stop going for the easy buck and start producing something with your life. Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."

Vice President of Project Finance

Clean Power Finance, San Francisco, CA

Clean Power Finance is seeking a Vice President of Project Finance to source and execute its project financing strategy. This individual will report to the CEO and source & develop project finance transactions, and originate & structure tax equity and debt required for the Company's unique renewable financing products. This position requires highly sophisticated deal making and negotiation skills, analytical skills, extreme attention to detail and excellent interpersonal skills.

Responsibilities
• Ability to source and execute renewable energy project financing structures using a variety of financing vehicles including sale-leasebacks, partnership flips, pass-throughs and debt.
• Ability to apply knowledge to develop innovative modifications to existing project and financing structures/strategies as well as lead the development of new structured finance solutions.
• Coordinate directly with banks, institutional investors, and legal resources to manage the timely execution renewable energy project transactions.
• Partner with legal resources in the drafting and execution of term sheets, financing documents, and contracts associated with renewable energy project financings.


Clean Power Finance is the leading provider of integrated software, services and financing solutions to the solar industry. Based in San Francisco, the company’s mission is to drive the adoption of renewable energy in the mass market. Clean Power Finance delivers an end-to-end solution that supports sales and marketing business processes for integrators, distributors and manufacturers. Since its introduction, the CPF Tools software platform has garnered enthusiastic reviews and currently supports over 30 percent of the solar installer community nationwide.

Universities ranked by ROI

MIT, Caltech and Harvard lead the pack. Berkeley is the top public school and beats out Brown, Columbia and Cornell. (Actually, for in-state students, the percentage ROI for Berkeley is the highest because tuition is low.) Full list and methodology discussion here.

These results are using a sample of graduates who only obtained a bachelor's degree and no higher degree. The ROI dollar amount is the *difference* in income between graduates and non-graduates. (See methodology note at link above.)

As noted by commenters, the results don't really isolate the value added by the university -- for that to be the case one would, at minimum, have to control for SAT or IQ score. See here for earlier discussion. The total earnings are almost a proxy for student quality -- I bet these rankings correlate very highly with average SAT score of the school.

Rank
School Name
School Type
Average Cost for College in 2009
30 Year ROI (2010 Dollars)
Annual ROI

1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Private
$189,300
$1,688,000
12.6%

2
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Private
$181,100
$1,644,000
12.6%

3
Harvard University
Private
$189,600
$1,631,000
12.5%

4
Harvey Mudd College
Private
$187,700
$1,627,000
12.5%

5
Dartmouth College
Private
$188,400
$1,587,000
12.4%

6
Stanford University
Private
$191,800
$1,565,000
12.3%

7
Princeton University
Private
$187,700
$1,517,000
12.3%

8
Yale University
Private
$194,200
$1,392,000
11.9%

16
University of California, Berkeley
Public (In-State)
$118,900
$1,223,000
13.1%

China: genomics without political correctness

A reader in Argentina recommends the following article about genomics in China.

Economist: ... with the delivery of 120 spanking new top-of-the-range Illumina sequencing machines. When they have all been installed the building will, so it is claimed, have more DNA-sequencing capacity than the whole of the United States.

... The building belongs to the BGI, once known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. Mr Wong manages the institute’s Hong Kong operation, but the institute itself is based over the border in the People’s Republic proper, in Shenzhen. The BGI itself is one part—arguably the leading one—of China’s effort to show that it can be the scientific peer of the West.

Its boss, Yang Huangming, is certainly the peer of people like Dr Venter, Dr Lander and Dr Collins. He is a man on a mission to make the BGI the first global genomics operation. Part of the reason for building his newest sequencing centre in Hong Kong is to reassure researchers from other countries that the facility will operate inside a reliable legal framework. If all goes well, laboratories in North America and Europe will follow.

... The BGI was the first outfit to clone pigs, and it has developed a new and more effective way of cloning mammals that might ultimately be applied to humans, if that were ever permitted.

But the organisation is involved in even more controversial projects. It is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics—or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away.

Of course an almost equally interesting question is when will the Chinese start producing their own successors to the Illumina sequencers?

What's special about Foo?

On my way home I thought a bit about what is so special about Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp. If I recall correctly, I've now attended 3 times: 2007, 2008 and 2010. Probably what I am about to say is not new, although it does come from my atypical physicist / entrepreneur / amateur social scientist perspective.

There are famous and influential people at Foo, but I imagine other gatherings (that I don't get invited to, such as Davos :-) have even more.

There are smart people at Foo, but average IQs at meetings in certain subfields are even higher.

There are really creative and energetic people at Foo, and on these criteria I doubt it can be surpassed.

But, in my mind, the two things that make the meeting truly unique are:

1. The diversity of talents and viewpoints, with participants ranging from hackers to social activists to scientists to grizzled CEOs and investors. The people at Foo are deliberately trying to create the future and are engaged with all that that entails: technology, ideas, organizations, capital.

2. The unique *social* environment. Tim has managed to create a "social reality distortion field" which enables interactions that are passionate but simultaneously friendly and open. People are genuinely happy to be at Foo Camp, and they are generous, intellectually and otherwise, with others. If I hear an argument at Foo that I don't agree with, I will try to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt, and factor in the unique knowledge and experience they bring to the issue. My questions will be friendly and non-aggressive. This is quite different from what happens at specialized meetings (e.g., among physicists) or in academia in general.

What can other meetings learn from Foo? If organizers are brave enough and set the social tone from the beginning, they can positively affect the quality of the event. Also, since interesting people are often multi-faceted, it might be worth setting aside some time in the evening for short demos or discussions on topics outside the main focus of the meeting. Sometimes at physics workshops I am amazed at how boring the dinner conversations are, given the special brains at the table. Some of the best talks I've attended at Foo are on "life topics'' such as dealing with success and failure, Paleo fitness, work/life balance, living green, etc.

Here is a great post by Scott Berkun, with similar thoughts about what makes Foo special. It seems that Scott and I went to almost entirely different sessions, which is probably why I barely had a chance to say hello to him this year.

Foo 2010 photos

Another wonderful weekend at Foo Camp! I am exhausted but happy :-)

I was too busy to take a lot of photos, but I forced myself to snap a few in aid of long term memory. If you're in one of these pictures and you want me to take it down, just let me know. Click for larger versions.


Tim O'Reilly addresses the campers. To my left are Fitbit CEO James Park and polymathematician Eric Weinstein.



Ben Huh, Mr. Lolcat, discusses internet memes.



A MakerBot 3D printer extruding a black frog.



Bre Pettis with his device.



Two CEOs from back in the day talk cloud data: Larry Augustin (VA Linux and SugarCRM) and Kim Polese (Marimba and SpikeSource)



The tent city. I felt wimpy staying at a hotel, but the tent area is too loud for me at night. I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice population of Foo people there -- I met Qi Lu (President MSFT Online Services / Bing) there over breakfast.



DJ Patil of LinkedIn analytics shows VC Joi Ito a graph of his social network.







Liam Casey of PCH and Bunny Huang of Chumby discuss manufacturing in China. Small startups can attempt hardware plays without huge capex if they are smart and know how to work with China. At the moment few VCs are interested in hardware plays, but that may change.



Charlene Li (of Forrester fame) discusses geek parenting. This year the organizers made a big effort to invite women to Foo, and the gender ratio, although still imbalanced, was better than in the past. Interestingly, this panel was attended almost entirely by dads!



Late night with Abdur Chowdhury (Chief Scientist, Twitter) and Eric Weinstein.



Google Earth demo.




Here is another set of photos on Flickr.

Foo Camp 2010

I'm off to Foo Camp tomorrow. See you in Sebastopol!

Here is a description of last year.

Supply, Demand and Scientists

Longtime reader STS referred me to this excellent article on the career prospects of young American scientists. It's long, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

See also A Tale of Two Geeks , Survivor: theoretical physics.

The Real Science Gap: ... To remain competitive against rising rivals, the nation must reconstruct this system so it once again guides the best of America’s large supply of young scientific ability into research and innovation. This process, experts contend, begins with identifying the real reason that scientifically gifted young Americans are increasingly unable and unwilling to pursue scientific careers. It is not, as many believe, that the nation is producing too few scientists, but, paradoxically, just the opposite.

“There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman, a pre-eminent authority on the scientific work force. Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a leading demographer who is also a national authority on science training, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.

Back when today’s senior-most professors were young, Ph.D.s routinely became tenure-track assistant professors, complete with labs of their own, in their late 20s. But today, in many fields, faculty openings routinely draw hundreds of qualified applicants. The tiny fraction who do manage to land their first faculty post are generally in their late 30s or early 40s by the time they get their research careers under way. Today’s large surplus of scientists began in the life sciences but is now apparent in fields as diverse as astronomy, meteorology and high-energy physics. These surpluses, Teitelbaum notes, hardly constitute “market indicators signaling shortages.”

The shortage theorists and the glut proponents, however, do agree on two things: First, something serious is wrong with America’s scientific labor supply. A prime symptom noted by all: a growing aversion of America’s top students — especially the native-born white males who once formed the backbone of the nation’s research and technical community — to enter scientific careers. Increasingly, foreign-born technical and scientific personnel on temporary visas staff America’s university labs and high-tech industries.

The second point of agreement is that, unless the underlying problem is fixed, it will seriously impair the nation’s ability to recruit top-flight homegrown talent — both for domestic innovation and for the high-level, classified, technical work vital for national security.

But disagreement rages about causes and cures. Is the influx of foreigners a cause of high-achieving Americans’ reluctance to become scientists, as the labor force experts assert, or an effect, as the industry interests insist? Once all the political rhetoric and verbiage of blue-ribbon panels is cleared away, the data clearly support those arguing for the existence of a glut of aspiring scientists.

America’s schools, it turns out, consistently produce large numbers of world-class science and math students, according to studies by Harold Salzman of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and his co-author, B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies for the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. But the incentives that once reliably delivered many of those high scorers into scientific and technical careers have gone seriously awry.

If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career. “It’s not an education story, it’s a labor market story,” Salzman says.

... For the great majority, becoming a scientist now entails a penurious decade or more of graduate school and postdoc positions before joining the multitude vainly vying for the few available faculty-level openings. Earning a doctorate now consumes an average of about seven years. In many fields, up to five more years as a postdoc now constitute, in the words of Trevor Penning, who formerly headed postdoctoral programs at the University of Pennsylvania, the “terminal de facto credential” required for faculty-level posts.

And today’s postdocs rarely pursue their own ideas or work with the greats of their field. Nearly every faculty member with a research grant — and that is just about every tenure-track or tenured member of a science department at any of several hundred universities — now uses postdocs to do the bench work for the project. Paid out of the grant, these highly skilled employees might earn $40,000 a year for 60 or more hours a week in the lab. A lucky few will eventually land faculty posts, but even most of those won’t get traditional permanent spots with the potential of tenure protection. The majority of today’s new faculty hires are “soft money” jobs with titles like “research assistant professor” and an employment term lasting only as long as the specific grant that supports it.

Many young Americans bright enough to do the math therefore conclude that instead of gambling 12 years on the small chance of becoming an assistant professor, they can invest that time in becoming a neurosurgeon, or a quarter of it in becoming a lawyer or a sixth in earning an MBA. And many who do earn doctorates in math-based subjects opt to use their skills devising mathematical models on Wall Street, rather than solving scientific puzzles in university labs, hoping a professorship opens up.

For scientifically trained young people from abroad, though — especially those from low-wage countries like China and India — the calculus of opportunity is different. For them, postdoc work in the U.S. is an almost unbeatable opportunity. Besides the experience and prestige of working in the world’s leading scientific power, a postdoc research position is likely to pay many times more than a job at home would.

... But unless the nation stops, as one Johns Hopkins professor put it, “burning its intellectual capital” by heedlessly using talented young people as cheap labor, the possibility of drawing the best of them back into careers as scientists will become increasingly remote. A nation that depends on innovation for its prosperity, that has unsurpassed universities and research centers, and that has long prided itself on the ingenuity and inventiveness of its technical elite, must devise ways of making solid careers in science once again both captivating and attainable. There’s no shortage of American talent. What’s in critically short supply are the ideas and determination to use that talent wisely.

Coincidentally, I just spent a week with Harvard economist Richard Freeman in Hangzhou.

Gorilla warfare: chimps mean too, bonobos our only hope

I used to bump into one of the authors at lunch (at Silliman; when Yale offered free lunch to cheapskate professors), and he would regale me with stories about his adventures following bands of young male chimps. It's amazing that he and his collaborators have kept up this research for over 20 years now.

NYTimes: ... A band of males, up to 20 or so, will assemble in single file and move to the edge of their territory. They fall into unusual silence as they penetrate deep into the area controlled by the neighboring group. They tensely scan the treetops and startle at every noise. “It’s quite clear that they are looking for individuals of the other community,” Dr. Mitani says.

When the enemy is encountered, the patrol’s reaction depends on its assessment of the opposing force. If they seem to be outnumbered, members of the patrol will break file and bolt back to home territory. But if a single chimp has wandered into their path, they will attack. Enemy males will be held down, then bitten and battered to death. Females are usually let go, but their babies will be eaten.

These killings have a purpose, but one that did not emerge until after Ngogo chimps’ patrols had been tracked and cataloged for 10 years. The Ngogo group has about 150 chimps and is particularly large, about three times the usual size. And its size makes it unusually aggressive. Its males directed most of their patrols against a chimp group that lived in a region to the northeast of their territory. Last year, the Ngogo chimps stopped patrolling the region and annexed it outright, increasing their home territory by 22 percent, Dr. Mitani said in a report being published Tuesday in Current Biology with his colleagues David P. Watts of Yale University and Sylvia J. Amsler of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Dr. Mitani is at the University of Michigan.

... The objective of the 10-year campaign was clearly to capture territory, the researchers concluded. The Ngogo males could control more fruit trees, their females would have more to eat and so would reproduce faster, and the group would grow larger, stronger and more likely to survive. The chimps’ waging of war is thus “adaptive,” Dr. Mitani and his colleagues concluded, meaning that natural selection has wired the behavior into the chimps’ neural circuitry because it promotes their survival.

Chimpanzee warfare is of particular interest because of the possibility that both humans and chimps inherited an instinct for aggressive territoriality from their joint ancestor who lived some five million years ago. Only two previous cases of chimp warfare have been recorded, neither as clear-cut as the Ngogo case.

... Through decades of careful work, primatologists have documented the links in a long causal chain, proving for instance that females with access to more fruit trees will bear children faster.

... Warfare among human groups that still live by hunting and gathering resembles chimp warfare in several ways. Foragers emphasize raids and ambushes in which few people are killed, yet casualties can mount up with incessant skirmishes. Dr. Wrangham argues that chimps and humans have both inherited a propensity for aggressive territoriality from a chimplike ancestor. Others argue the chimps’ peaceful cousin, the bonobo, is just as plausible a model for the joint ancestor.

... Why do chimps incur the risk and time costs of patrolling into enemy territory when the advantage accrues most evidently to the group? Dr. Mitani invokes the idea of group-level selection — the idea that natural selection can work on groups and favor behaviors, like altruism and cooperation, that benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Selection usually depends only on whether an individual, not a group, leaves more surviving children.

Many biologists are skeptical of group-level selection, saying it could be effective only in cases where there is intense warfare between groups, a reduced rate of selection on individuals, and little interchange of genes between groups. Chimp warfare may be constant and ferocious, fulfilling the first condition, but young females emigrate to neighboring groups to avoid inbreeding. This constant flow of genes would severely weaken any group selective process, Dr. Wrangham said.

Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute who has worked out theoretical models of group selection, said the case for it “is pretty strong for humans” but remains an open question in chimpanzees.

Chimp watching is an arduous task since researchers must first get the chimpanzees used to their presence, but without inducements like bananas, which could interfere with their natural behavior. Chimpanzees are immensely powerful, and since they can tear each other apart, they could also make short work of any researcher who incurred their animosity.

“Luckily for us, they haven’t figured out that they are stronger than us,” Dr. Mitani said, explaining that there was no danger in tagging along behind a file of chimps on the warpath. “What’s curious is that after we do gain their trust, we sort of blend into the background and they pretty much ignore us.”

Greetings from Shanghai

Sorry for the long absence. I'm sitting in the first class lounge at Shanghai airport, about to fly back. My failure to blog had nothing to do with the Great Firewall -- my proxy fu works perfectly over here.

This is the first espresso I've had in a week:


This is the view from the lounge (note I'm not traveling first class; just using the lounge):



I spent the first week here in Hangzhou, working on a project I've described before. The company involved is a bit sensitive so I'm not allowed to post any photos.

I spent yesterday in Shanghai and was able to see the Expo. The scale of the exposition is just overwhelming. You could spend a week visiting all the pavilions -- even assuming you didn't have to wait in line. I don't know what will become of this space once the Expo is over -- I visited the Expo grounds in Sevilla (1992) five years after the event and it was like a ghost town.

A couple of travel tips. If you're here in the summer, don't go to the Expo during the day -- it's just too hot. Go in the evening when it's cooler and the lines are shorter. The entrances to the Expo are near metro stations, so very accessible. I stayed at an inexpensive hotel -- only 250 rmb ($35 per night; that's how we roll :-) -- a few stops away from the main entrance on the number 7 line and close to the maglev station so I could get to the airport this morning. There are a wide range of restaurants at the park -- you can have inexpensive fast food, or enjoy a long, relaxed dinner at a fancy place.

The attendees at the Expo were overwhelmingly Asian. I'd guess only 1 percent of the 400k visitors in the park yesterday were from somewhere else. People from a broad variety of backgrounds were enjoying themselves. The Expo started as the World's Fair, which was supposed to be a way for people of an earlier era to see the rest of the world without leaving home. Since most Chinese cannot afford foreign travel yet, the event still retains some of that old glamour for them.

The official theme of the Expo is Better City, Better Life. Many exhibits emphasized green issues; I think the environmental movement in China is progressing very fast, with support from the government. See the plug-in electric car below!

Below are some photos -- click for larger versions.










I had an interesting conversation with an ethnic German guy from Namibia that I happened to sit next to on the train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. He owns a chain of supermarkets there and in South Africa and was in China on a buying trip. He noticed me reading a paper on psychometrics and immediately wanted to discuss the implications for development. (Note the paper was a pretty abstract one -- about causal inference!) His thoughts on the prospects of Africa, and comparisons between the US, China and Africa were quite interesting. He was familiar with the results showing group differences between Asians, Europeans and Africans and he accepted those as consistent with his own experiences. But he claimed that the main factor that held Africans back was lack of drive -- why do something today when it can be done tomorrow? He didn't view this as a fault, though. The mad pace of development in places like China seemed excessive to him: Do material things make people happier? he asked.

According to this German-Namibian, in much of Africa one can survive with a minimum of effort -- long term planning and organization aren't required as they would be in a place with harsh winters. Hence, less selection for such traits has occurred. This is of course an old theory, but it was rather amazing to hear it stated so matter of factly by an educated person with first hand knowledge of Africa.

The Great Game: 21st century edition

Strategic interest in Afghanistan will increase dramatically if these results hold up. But how (physically) will these minerals get to market?

NYTimes: ... Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

Great firewall warning

Posting may be reduced for while due to technical difficulties and jet lag :-)

Did I mention I am spending my sabbatical next year at Academia Sinica in Taiwan?

Volcker: time is growing short

There's more about trade and fiscal balances, etc., but I thought the following was particularly good.

NY Review of Books: ... I think it is fair to say that for some time the dominant approach of economic theorizing, increasingly reflected in public policy, has been that free and open financial markets, supported by advances in electronic technology and by sophisticated financial engineering, would most effectively support both market efficiency and stability. Without heavily intrusive regulation, investable funds would flow to the most profitable and productive uses. The inherent risks of making loans and extending credits would be diffused and reallocated among those best able and willing to bear them.

It is an attractive thesis, attractive not only in concept but for those participating in its seeming ability to generate enormous financial rewards. Our best business schools developed and taught ever more complicated models. A large share of the nation’s best young talent was attracted to finance. However, even when developments seemed most benign, there were warning signs.

Has the contribution of the modern world of finance to economic growth become so critical as to support remuneration to its participants beyond any earlier experience and expectations? Does the past profitability of and the value added by the financial industry really now justify profits amounting to as much as 35 to 40 percent of all profits by all US corporations? Can the truly enormous rise in the use of derivatives, complicated options, and highly structured financial instruments really have made a parallel contribution to economic efficiency? If so, does analysis of economic growth and productivity over the past decade or so indicate visible acceleration of growth or benefits flowing down to the average American worker who even before the crisis had enjoyed no increase in real income?

There was one great growth industry. Private debt relative to GDP nearly tripled in thirty years. Credit default swaps, invented little more than a decade ago, soared at their peak to a $60 trillion market, exceeding by a large multiple the amount of the underlying credits potentially hedged against default. Add to those specifics the opacity that accompanied the enormous complexity of such transactions.

The nature and depth of the financial crisis is forcing us to reconsider some of the basic tenets of financial theory. To my way of thinking, that is both necessary and promising in pointing toward useful reform.

One basic flaw running through much of the recent financial innovation is that thinking embedded in mathematics and physics could be directly adapted to markets. A search for repetitive patterns of behavior and computations of normal distribution curves are a big part of the physical sciences. However, financial markets are not driven by changes in natural forces but by human phenomena, with all their implications for herd behavior, for wide swings in emotion, and for political intervention and uncertainties. ...

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

The New Yorker has a great profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange started as a hacker, studied math and physics for a while at university, and now devotes all of his time to activism. See here for the WikiLeaks short film Collateral Murder.

I was once involved in crypto fun myself ;-)

New Yorker: ... Assange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian Institute of Physics, “with 900 career physicists, the body of which were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character.”

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. “He wouldn’t sleep at all,” a person who was living in the house told me. “He wouldn’t eat.”

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

For more from Assange's blog, like the following, see here.

... I attended an Australian Institute of Physics conference at ANU with 900 career physicists, the body of which were snivelling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character. For every Feynman or Lorentz, 100 pen pushing wretches scratching each others eyes out in academic committees ...

The personality quirks brought to life so well in the New Yorker profile are illuminated by Assange's blog entry (Sat 23 Sep 2006: William James Sidis) concerning high IQ and social maladjustment -- excerpted from this essay by Grady Towers :-)

Shanghai Expo

I'm passing through Shanghai soon and I hope to see the Expo. Anyone have logistical tips or recommendations? Which country pavilions are most interesting?

I love modern architecture, although I'm not sure what to make of the UK pavilion pictured below.



This is the China pavilion:






The Little Mermaid on loan to the Danish pavilion:



More here. NYTimes slideshow. WSJ slideshow.

The nuclear option

The Soviets apparently used nukes 120 times for civilian purposes, including to put out gas fires. See also here.

NYTimes: ...Much of the enthusiasm for an atomic approach is based on reports that the Soviet Union succeeded in using nuclear blasts to seal off gas wells. Milo D. Nordyke, in a 2000 technical paper for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., described five Soviet blasts from 1966 to 1981.

All but the last blast were successful. The 1966 explosion put out a gas well fire that had raged uncontrolled for three years. But the last blast of the series, Mr. Nordyke wrote, “did not seal the well,” perhaps because the nuclear engineers had poor geological data on the exact location of the borehole.

Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian, noted that all the Soviet blasts were on land and never involved oil.

Whatever the technical merits of using nuclear explosions for constructive purposes, the end of the cold war brought wide agreement among nations to give up the conduct of all nuclear blasts, even for peaceful purposes. The United States, after conducting more than 1,000 nuclear test explosions, detonated the last one in 1992, shaking the ground at the Nevada test site.

Pundits joked about the appointment of astrophysicist Jonathan Katz to the DOE "dream team" that advised Obama on how to deal with the oil spill. What would an astrophysicist know about capping an oil well? These pundits were unaware of Katz's work as a Jason. (See also here. Jasons Steve Weinberg, Freeman Dyson and Richard Muller invented adaptive optics, which was promptly classified by the military and kept from civilian astronomers for a decade.)

Of course, we all know what happened to Katz once his politically incorrect views came to light. We first mentioned Katz on this blog back in 2004.