Nature on the PhD glut

Nature reports on the worldwide glut of PhDs. The path to a permanent (tenured) position these days is nasty, brutish and long.

See related posts Supply, demand and scientists , A tale of two geeks , Survivor: theoretical physics

Nature: ... In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more — but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia. Here, Nature examines graduate-education systems in various states of health. ...


Japan: A system in crisis

Of all the countries in which to graduate with a science PhD, Japan is arguably one of the worst. In the 1990s, the government set a policy to triple the number of postdocs to 10,000, and stepped up PhD recruitment to meet that goal. The policy was meant to bring Japan's science capacity up to match that of the West — but is now much criticized because, although it quickly succeeded, it gave little thought to where all those postdocs were going to end up. ...


China: Quantity outweighs quality?

The number of PhD holders in China is going through the roof, with some 50,000 people graduating with doctorates across all disciplines in 2009 — and by some counts it now surpasses all other countries. The main problem is the low quality of many graduates. ...


United States: Supply versus demand

To Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who studies PhD trends, it is "scandalous" that US politicians continue to speak of a PhD shortage. The United States is second only to China in awarding science doctorates — it produced an estimated 19,733 in the life sciences and physical sciences in 2009 — and production is going up. But Stephan says that no one should applaud this trend, "unless Congress wants to put money into creating jobs for these people rather than just creating supply". ...

The problem is most acute in the life sciences, in which the pace of PhD growth is biggest, yet pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have been drastically downsizing in recent years. In 1973, 55% of US doctorates in the biological sciences secured tenure-track positions within six years of completing their PhDs, and only 2% were in a postdoc or other untenured academic position. By 2006, only 15% were in tenured [tenure-track] positions six years after graduating, with 18% untenured ...

Some universities are now experimenting with PhD programmes that better prepare graduate students for careers outside academia (see page 280). Anne Carpenter, a cellular biologist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is trying to create jobs for existing PhD holders, while discouraging new ones. When she set up her lab four years ago, Carpenter hired experienced staff scientists on permanent contracts instead of the usual mix of temporary postdocs and graduate students. "The whole pyramid scheme of science made little sense to me," says Carpenter. "I couldn't in good conscience churn out a hundred graduate students and postdocs in my career."

But Carpenter has struggled to justify the cost of her staff to grant-review panels. "How do I compete with laboratories that hire postdocs for $40,000 instead of a scientist for $80,000?" she asks. Although she remains committed to her ideals, she says that she will be more open to hiring postdocs in the future. ...


Germany: The progressive PhD

Germany is Europe's biggest producer of doctoral graduates, turning out some 7,000 science PhDs in 2005. After a major redesign of its doctoral education programmes over the past 20 years, the country is also well on its way to solving the oversupply problem. ... [REALLY?]

Just under 6% of PhD graduates in science eventually go into full-time academic positions, and most will find research jobs in industry, says Thorsten Wilhelmy, who studies doctoral education for the German Council of Science and Humanities in Cologne. "The long way to professorship in Germany and the relatively low income of German academic staff makes leaving the university after the PhD a good option," he says. ...

High investment parenting 2: quality vs quantity

The WSJ recently hosted a discussion about Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids.

In his arguments Caplan relies heavily on the behavior genetics findings I have discussed previously here and here. These findings show that it is very difficult for parents to shape their kids, and that genes have a larger impact than "shared environment" (i.e., effects from being raised in the same family). One can study these effects by varying genetic relatedness (e.g., identical twins vs fraternal twins) and environment (adoption into different families, variation of family characteristics such as SES, parental education, etc.).

This is from some correspondence (slightly edited) I had with a new father about Caplan's book.

The question is whether you accept the behavior genetics conclusions at the Tiger Mom/Dad extremes. That is, the twin/adoption data covers mostly normal people and probably cannot be extrapolated with confidence to exceptional cases like high IQ families with a strong focus on education and achievement.

I am very committed to helping my kids, although not in the Amy Chua way, and I wonder how well I could succeed if I had, say, 4 instead of 2 kids. As it is I can think of stuff almost every day that I could have done with them if I wasn't so busy with other things.

I take my kids out and play with them as much as I can. But not just random play. For example, I run races with them and I notice that at this age they can improve their running ability a lot by practicing. They have probably run hundreds (or maybe thousands!) more flat out sprints (say 40 yards) than a typical Taiwanese kid of the same age. (Cities there are very crowded, so it's not easy even to find a place to do something like this.) I can imagine that their self-esteem and ability to do well in school sports might be improved by my willingness to not only spend time with them but to insist that we do something modestly constructive while we are having fun.

I see lots of US dads already teaching their kids how to hit a baseball or do other sports specific things. I've spent a lot of time in sports and athletics, and while genes matter, training also matters, especially at the K-12 level where the threshold for making the team is much lower than in college. Even in football, basic skills like accelerating out of a 3 point stance are things you learn through early repetition and are hard to pick up later in life.

My dad was a professor but not a natural teacher. We had a neighbor who was a math professor and very extroverted and passionate about his subject. His kids really didn't like to discuss math with him but I loved it and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I could offer that kind of thing to my kids (in many subjects), assuming the dynamics are right. But I certainly couldn't if I were too busy or had too many kids.

Early success in anything (sports, math, etc.) can be self-reinforcing and have non-linear effects down the line. I realize the behavior genetics data suggests that *averaged over large groups* such effects are small, but the studies are still crude and could easily miss some relatively significant strategies that you or I might take advantage of. Are you willing to take the risk of forgoing such positive impacts you might have on your kids?

I like Caplan in general but I think he's a little too hardcore libertarian and also a bit robotic (autistic economist) and simple-minded in his thinking.

Gopnik on machine intelligence

Adam Gopnik on machine intelligence, including a review of Brian Christian's book on the Turing Test, previously discussed here.

New Yorker: ... We have been outsourcing our intelligence, and our humanity, to machines for centuries. They have long been faster, bigger, tougher, more deadly. Now they are quicker at calculation and infinitely more adept at memory than we have ever been. And so now we decide that memory and calculation are not really part of mind. It's not just that we move the goalposts; we mock the machines' touchdowns as they spike the ball. We place the communicative element of language above the propositional and argumentative element, not because it matters more but because it’s all that’s left to us. ... Doubtless, even as the bots strap us down to the pods and insert the tubes in our backs, we'll still be chuckling, condescendingly, "They look like they're thinking, sure, very impressive -- but they don't have the affect, the style, you know, the vibe of real intelligence ..." What do we really mean by "smart"? The ability to continually diminish the area of what we mean by it.

Asian admissions in Boston Globe

Will disparate impact be applied in favor of Asian-American college applicants? Stay tuned! (Perhaps the NBA and NFL are next :-)

The article below appeared in today's Boston Globe Magazine. I'm sure that it will generate plenty of amusing comments there. A similar article in McLeans caused a furor in Canada.

Before commenting here, please peruse this earlier post and its 170+ comments to ensure you are contributing something new to the discussion ;-)

Competitive disadvantage: High-achieving Asian-American students are being shut out of top schools around the country. Is this what diversity looks like now?

... After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed – provoked over the winter by Amy Chua’s controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces.

And parents aren’t happy about it. “The entry barriers are higher for us than for everybody else,” says Chi Chi Wu, one of the organizers of the Brookline Asian American Family Network. “There’s a form of redlining or holding Asian-American students to higher standards than any other group.”

... However, in researching their 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans. >>Note: this is after controlling for grades, scores, family background (legacy status) and athletic status (whether the student was a recruited athlete.)<<

What about the argument that, in relation to the general population, Asian-Americans are already overrepresented at universities? “It’s both true that Asians are overrepresented and that they’re being discriminated against,” says Stephen Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon who speaks out against discrimination he says Asian-Americans face in university admissions. Both things can happen at the same time, he says.

Hsu and others allege that universities are more concerned about boosting black and Hispanic enrollment than admitting qualified Asian-Americans, and that old-fashioned xenophobia comes into play as well.

“My personal perspective is that if institutions are using race to keep Asian-American students out, it’s based on a fear [among non-minorities] that these ‘other’ students are taking over our institutions or taking ‘our spots’ at the best institutions,” says Sam Museus, a professor in the Asian-American studies program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

... Brookline organizer Chi Chi Wu, who is a lawyer and the mother of an 11-year-old, says it may be time to fight back, using a legal theory called disparate impact. “In other areas of civil rights law, when you have statistical disparities, you can often make a case. You don’t have to prove the university is saying, ‘We don’t want all these Asians,’ but just having those statistics and being able to point to disparities is enough.”

She adds, “If we Asian-Americans don’t organize, there’s no amount of piano practicing that will help us.”

Goldman and Google

Two excellent podcasts I recommend.

William Cohan on his new book How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World. Cohan, a former banker, seems more knowledgeable than most financial journalists.

Steven Levy on his book How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Based on my own experience, Levy knows what he is talking about.

Bill Gross (Idealab) at Caltech

Went to a talk by Bill Gross (of Idealab, not Pimco) at the Caltech entrepreneur's club. Gross graduated in 1981 and is one of the most creative entrepreneurs in the world. Here's a great interview with him.

Back at Caltech

Just flew across the Pacific. Please allow for some latency in communication as I recover :-)


I'm staying across the street from Pasadena City College. It's a testament to the past glory of California that even a community college has such a nice campus.




A rare student protest at Caltech. Something about student representation and housing policies. At lunch one of the grad students commented he was amazed that this many undergrads were actually awake at noon :-)

High investment parenting

I'm no tiger dad, but I do draw little cartoon stories to help the kids with their reading. My wife points out that Isabel's drawing ability has now far surpassed mine. You can judge for yourself here and here.

Someday I hope to write a children's book with my daughter doing the illustrations :-)

How to Get a Real Education

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, writes in the Wall St. Journal.

WSJ: I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship? ...

Conquer Fear. ... Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill. [ See this post from 2004 for a summary of How to Win Friends and Influence People -- a timeless classic! ] ...

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

That's my starter list for the sort of classes that would serve B students well. The list is not meant to be complete. Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.

Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn't scare you, it probably should.

Update on NYTimes paywall

I posted before on miserly strategies to avoid buying a NYTimes subscription. It now appears to me their paywall is even wimpier than I had originally suspected. When I wrote the earlier post I hadn't yet experienced the paywall (either it wasn't on or I hadn't reached my limit of free articles for the month; I suspect the former). Having played around with it a bit, I've found the following.

If I try to read, for example, the Sidney Lumet obituary (btw, I highly recommend Dog Day Afternoon :-), the browser url bar shows the following when the subscription page has finally loaded:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/movies/sidney-lumet-director-of-american-classics-dies-at-86.html?hp&gwh=A8B811D09B0F452C9A3F74E25512D060

If I eliminate all the cruft after "html" so that the url bar reads

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/movies/sidney-lumet-director-of-american-classics-dies-at-86.html

then reloading lets me read the article for free. This has worked for every article I've tried -- probably 20 or so by now.

Forever Young

I found these in my iPhoto collection :-)


Jogging near CERN. No goats were harmed.



With Robert Nozick, back in the day. All of my suits were hand me downs from my brother the management consultant.



Two physicists and a poet, Christmas dinner.



My brother visits the Society of Fellows.



Scene from a wedding, duly noted in the New York Times M&A section. Wellesley and HBS merge with Caltech, MIT and Sloan. (See Bobos in Paradise p.42 :-)



A meal by the Seine.



Les Deux Magots.



Sagres, Portugal. Once thought to be the end of the world :-)





Conil, Espana.





Future bomb boy using IBM XT "portable" to calculate some wavefunctions at 150 S. Chester, Pasadena.



Winter in Iowa -- our back yard.




Best viewed with Forever Young, Jay-Z and Alphaville. Photos and long term memory.

Taiwan photos 12

This lighthouse is at the southern tip of the island.



This is at the aquarium.



This is at Academia Sinica.





Best viewed with Forever Young, Jay-Z and Alphaville. Photos and long term memory.

Man vs Machine: inside the Turing Test

Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, tells interviewer Leonard Lopate what it's like to be a participant in the Loebner Prize competition, an annual version of the Turing Test. See also Christian's article, excerpted below.

Atlantic Monthly: ... The first Loebner Prize competition was held on November 8, 1991, at the Boston Computer Museum. In its first few years, the contest required each program and human confederate to choose a topic, as a means of limiting the conversation. One of the confederates in 1991 was the Shakespeare expert Cynthia Clay, who was, famously, deemed a computer by three different judges after a conversation about the playwright. The consensus seemed to be: “No one knows that much about Shakespeare.” (For this reason, Clay took her misclassifications as a compliment.)

... Philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have been puzzling over the essential definition of human uniqueness since the beginning of recorded history. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of what he calls “The Sentence.” Specifically, The Sentence reads like this:

The human being is the only animal that ______.
The story of humans’ sense of self is, you might say, the story of failed, debunked versions of The Sentence. Except now it’s not just the animals that we’re worried about.

We once thought humans were unique for using language, but this seems less certain each year; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this claim also erodes with ongoing animal-behavior research; we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

We might ask ourselves: Is it appropriate to allow our definition of our own uniqueness to be, in some sense, reactive to the advancing front of technology? And why is it that we are so compelled to feel unique in the first place?

“Sometimes it seems,” says Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer Prize–winning cognitive scientist, “as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.” While at first this seems a consoling position—one that keeps our unique claim to thought intact—it does bear the uncomfortable appearance of a gradual retreat, like a medieval army withdrawing from the castle to the keep. But the retreat can’t continue indefinitely. Consider: if everything that we thought hinged on thinking turns out to not involve it, then … what is thinking? It would seem to reduce to either an epiphenomenon—a kind of “exhaust” thrown off by the brain—or, worse, an illusion.

Where is the keep of our selfhood?

The story of the 21st century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redrawing of these battle lines, the story of Homo sapiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground, flanked by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.

... In May 1989, Mark Humphrys, a 21-year-old University College Dublin undergraduate, put online an Eliza-style program he’d written, called “MGonz,” and left the building for the day. A user (screen name “Someone”) at Drake University in Iowa tentatively sent the message “finger” to Humphrys’s account—an early-Internet command that acted as a request for basic information about a user. To Someone’s surprise, a response came back immediately: “cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences.” This began an argument between Someone and MGonz that lasted almost an hour and a half. (The best part was undoubtedly when Someone said, “you sound like a goddamn robot that repeats everything.”)

Returning to the lab the next morning, Humphrys was stunned to find the log, and felt a strange, ambivalent emotion. His program might have just shown how to pass the Turing Test, he thought—but the evidence was so profane that he was afraid to publish it. ...

Perhaps one of the lessons that MGonz illustrates is that you can appear more intelligent by interacting confidently and aggressively :-)

Human capital and Indian development

Another story in the WSJ on human capital in India. Some readers objected to a related post I made last week, accusing me of Chinese jingoism for pointing out some qualitative differences in Indian and Chinese economic development. Let me say that I have nothing but respect for the many talented Indians I have known in physics and in technology. But it's important to clarify to what extent elite (highly selected) subgroups, such as, e.g., Indians in the US, or IIT graduates, are representative of the broader population upon whom India's continued economic growth depends. It's entirely possible, as the article below suggests, that India's IT and outsourced service industries are starting to experience real human capital limitations.

WSJ: BANGALORE, India—Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.

Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.

In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore.

"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."

... Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.

But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.

Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.

At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.

... Trying to bridge the widening chasm between job requirements and the skills of graduates, Tata has extended its internal training program. It puts fresh graduates through 72 days of training, double the duration in 1986, says Tata chief executive N. Chandrasekaran. Tata has a special campus in south India where it trains 9,000 recruits at a time, and has plans to bump that up to 10,000.

Wipro runs an even longer, 90-day training program to address what Mr. Govil, the human-resources executive, calls the "inherent inadequacies" in Indian engineering education. The company can train 5,000 employees at once.

Both companies sent teams of employees to India's approximately 3,000 engineering colleges to assess the quality of each before they decided where to focus their campus recruiting efforts. Tata says 300 of the schools made the cut; for Wipro, only 100 did.

Chinese university graduates would probably perform even worse on tasks requiring English-language skills. However, I do think that the strong performance of Shanghai high school students on recent PISA exams (administered in Mandarin) is a reasonable indicator of education levels in China. That is, although Shanghai averages are likely higher than national averages, the rest of the country is probably not that far behind.

Comment moderation

I'm getting a lot of complaints about a certain commenter (if you read the comments you will already know who I am talking about). So, I've switched the DISQUS settings, making registration required to comment. I may also start deleting inappropriate comments, as time permits. I don't want to get into full blown moderation as it's too time consuming. We'll see how it goes.

Sorry for the inconvenience but this is an all too common problem on blogs.

Earnings effects of personality, education and IQ for the gifted

Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this recent paper by Heckman and collaborators, which makes use of data from the Terman study of gifted individuals (minimum IQ of 135 on the Stanford-Binet).

Of the personality factors, Conscientiousness and Extraversion had the largest (positive) effect on lifetime earnings: the most conscientious or extraverted individuals earned, on average, about 50% more than the least (see figures below). See here for more on Big 5 personality factors and a link to a personality test.

The Effects of Education, Personality, and IQ on Earnings of High-Ability Men

This paper estimates the internal rate of return (IRR) to education for men and women of the Terman sample, a 70-year long prospective cohort study of high-ability individuals. The Terman data is unique in that it not only provides full working-life earnings histories of the participants, but it also includes detailed profiles of each subject, including IQ and measures of latent personality traits. Having information on latent personality traits is significant as it allows us to measure the importance of personality on educational attainment and lifetime earnings.

Our analysis addresses two problems of the literature on returns to education: First, we establish causality of the treatment effect of education on earnings by implementing generalized matching on a full set of observable individual characteristics and unobserved personality traits. Second, since we observe lifetime earnings data, our estimates of the IRR are direct and do not depend on the assumptions that are usually made in order to justify the interpretation of regression coefficients as rates of return.

For the males, the returns to education beyond high school are sizeable. For example, the IRR for obtaining a bachelor's degree over a high school diploma is 11.1%, and for a doctoral degree over a bachelor's degree it is 6.7%. These results are unique because they highlight the returns to high-ability and high-education individuals, who are not well-represented in regular data sets.

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years. Therefore, estimates from samples with shorter durations underestimate the treatment effects.

Here are a couple of interesting excerpts from the paper:

... Our third contribution is to show how the effect of personality on earnings varies through-out the men’s working lives. We find that without access to long follow-up data, the estimated effect would be understated. Note that even though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

... note that even when controlling for rich background variables, IQ maintains a statistically significant effect on lifetime earnings. Even though the effect is slightly diminished from the un-controlled association of the first column, it is still sizable. Malcolm Gladwell claims rather generally in his book Outliers that for the Terman men, IQ did not matter once family background and other observable personal characteristics were taken into account. While we do not want to argue that IQ has a larger role for the difference between 50 and 100, for example, than for the difference between 150 and 200, we do want to point out that even at the high end of the ability distribution, IQ has meaningful consequences. [The syntax of this last sentence is strange. Presumably the impact of IQ variation from 50 to 100 (from severely handicapped to average) is larger than for 150 to 200, even though their results show a significant effect even in the very high range.]

Below are some nice figures (click for larger versions). Note the personality factor distribution among Termites was similar to that of the overall population, whereas the IQ range was restricted due to selection. Typical lifetime earnings for this group of exceptionally able men ranged from $2 to $3 million in 2008 dollars.




Compare the bottom right IQ graph with SMPY results which show the impact of ability (SAT-M measured before age 13) on publication and patent rates. Ability in the SMPY graph varies between 99th and 99.99th percentile in quartiles Q1-Q4. The variation in IQ between the bottom and top deciles of the Terman study covers a similar range. The Terman super-smarties (i.e., +4 SD) only earned slightly more (say, 15-20% over a lifetime) than the ordinary smarties (i.e., +2.5 SD), but the probability of earning a patent (SMPY) went up by about 4x over the corresponding ability range.

Dynamic blog views

Some cool ways to view this blog. There are 5 new views in total, which you can access from a drop down menu. Check it out!

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/view/flipcard

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/view/sidebar

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/view/mosaic

Ruh Roh!

The dreaded double dip!



Non-Americans see here for explanation of "Ruh Roh" :-)

India = Silicon Valley + Africa ?

A few hundred million (relatively) affluent middle class knowledge workers surrounded by almost a billion slumdogs is not a desirable development outcome. It may in fact be unstable (see below).

The only way I know of to raise the standard of living of a billion people is through the well-traveled (but dirty and energy intensive) path of industrialization and manufacturing. That is how the West, Japan, and Asian Tigers did it, and what China is doing now. Software parks and call centers are wonderful gleaming instantiations of modernity, but only a small fraction of the population in India have the cognitive ability to write code or deliver complex services in English. India optimists are only thinking about the elite minority -- what about the rest of the population?

We have yet to discover a scalable leapfrog to modernity that avoids heavy lifting in favor of bits.

See previous India posts, like Slumdog brainpower.

WSJ: ... Ravi Venkatesan, until this week chairman of Microsoft Corp.'s India arm, says his nation is at a crossroads. "We could end up with a rather unstable society, as aspirations are increasing and those left behind are no longer content to live out their lives. You already see anger and expressions of it," he says. "I strongly have a sense we're at a tipping point: There is incredible opportunity but also dark forces. What we do as an elite and as a country in the next couple of years will be very decisive."

... "What has globalization and industrialization done for India?" asks Mr. Venkatesan, Microsoft's former India chairman. "About 400 million people have seen benefits, and 800 million haven't."

Calorie consumption by the bottom 50% of the population has been declining since 1987, according to the 2009-10 economic survey conducted by India's Ministry of Finance, even as those at the top of society struggle with rising obesity. Mainly because of malnutrition, around 46% of children younger than 3 years old are too small for their age, according to UNICEF.

Infrastructure in cities and the countryside remains woefully inadequate: In recent years, China has added, on average, more than 10 times as much power as India to its electricity grid each year.

Data from McKinsey & Co. show that the number of households in the highest-earning income bracket, making more than $34,000 a year, has risen to 2.5 million, from 1 million in 2005. But the ranks of those at the bottom, making less than $3,000 a year, also have grown, to 111 million, from 101 million in 2005.

[Can these figures be correct? There are probably > 2.5 million households in Taiwan making over $34k a year!]

... India's modernization was expected to prompt a mass movement of workers from farms to factory floors—a critical component in the transformation of China, South Korea and other Asian nations. But manufacturing as a share of India's economy stood at 16% in 2009, the same as in 1991, according to the World Bank.

Services have increased dramatically as a proportion of gross domestic product, rising to 55% in 2009, from 45% in 1991, according to the World Bank, becoming the chief engine of India's economic strength. But many of the fastest-growing areas, such as finance and technology, employ relatively few and rely heavily on skilled employees. The entire software and technology-services sector, including call centers and outsourcing, directly employs just 2.5 million workers, a tiny fraction of the overall work force.

See also the interview below.

WSJ: Vineet Nayar, chief executive of software exporter HCL Technologies, dismisses complaints about corruption in India as a distraction, arguing that the real question the country needs to ask is whether it is becoming more or less globally competitive.

“Was India more globally competitive in 1990 or in 2005, or will it be more competitive in 2015?” questions Mr. Nayar. “Are the [current and future] policies of the government more populist or will they make India more competitive in the global arena?”

In a world where consumption patterns in the U.S. and Europe are at an all time low, even as they continue to hit new peaks in emerging markets, and where power bases are shifting from the West to emerging markets like China, Brazil and India, “country competitiveness is very important because you can either be used like China is using India for consumption [of Chinese exports],” says Mr. Nayar. Or you can become an exporter yourself.

And in his opinion, India is at that cusp today: Will it be used for its billion people or will it use its billion people?

“And there, unfortunately, my answer is that we are becoming less competitive with every passing day because of lack of investment in critical segments like skill development,” he said.

... “The only real raw material we have is people,” he went on. “If you convert people into consumers, we’ll become Africa. If you convert people into labor productivity, we’ll become America. We are at a cusp between America and Africa right now.”

Paul Allen: Idea Man

The excerpts below are from Paul Allen's new memoir Idea Man.

On Bill Gates and Harvard's notorious Math 55. What professor is Gates talking about below? The professor who currently teaches Math 55 is invited to comment -- anonymously, of course ;-)

... I offered a word to the wise: “You know, Bill, when you get to Harvard, there are going to be some people a lot better in math than you are.”

“No way,” he said. “There’s no way!”

And I said, “Wait and see.”

I was decent in math, and Bill was brilliant, but by then I spoke from my experience at Washington State. One day I watched a professor cover the blackboard with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was O.K. with being a generalist.

For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester, and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his Ph.D. at 16.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to 30 hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in 10 million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.

On Bill and Steve Ballmer conspiring to steal Allen's stake in the company while he was ill with cancer.

One evening in late December 1982, I heard Bill and Steve speaking heatedly in Bill’s office and paused outside to listen in. It was easy to get the gist of the conversation. They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. It was clear that they’d been thinking about this for some time.

Unable to stand it any longer, I burst in on them and shouted, “This is unbelievable! It shows your true character, once and for all.” I was speaking to both of them, but staring straight at Bill. Caught red-handed, they were struck dumb. Before they could respond, I turned on my heel and left.

I replayed their dialogue in my mind while driving home, and it felt more and more heinous to me. I helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off. It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple. That evening, a chastened Steve Ballmer called my house and asked my sister Jody if he could come over. “Look, Paul,” he said after we sat down together, “I’m really sorry about what happened today. We were just letting off steam. We’re trying to get so much stuff done, and we just wish you could contribute even more. But that stock thing isn’t fair. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it, and I’m sure Bill wouldn’t, either.”

I told Steve that the incident had left a bad taste in my mouth. A few days later, I received a six-page, handwritten letter from Bill. Dated December 31, 1982, the last day of our last full year together at Microsoft, it contained an apology for the conversation I’d overheard. And it offered a revealing, Bill’s-eye view of our partnership: “During the last 14 years we have had numerous disagreements. However, I doubt any two partners have ever agreed on as much both in terms of specific decisions and their general idea of how to view things.”

Bill was right. Our great string of successes had married my vision to his unmatched aptitude for business. But that was beside the point. Once I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s, my decision became simpler. If I were to relapse, it would be pointless—if not hazardous—to return to the stresses at Microsoft. If I continued to recover, I now understood that life was too short to spend it unhappily.

Bill’s letter was a last-ditch effort to get me to stay, and I knew he believed he had logic on his side. But it didn’t change anything. My mind was made up.

In January, I met with Bill one final time as a Microsoft executive. As he sat down with me on the couch in his office, I knew that he’d try to make me feel guilty and obliged to stay. But once he saw he couldn’t change my mind, Bill tried to cut his losses. When Microsoft incorporated, in 1981, our old partnership agreement was nullified, and with it his power to force me to accept a buyout based on “irreconcilable differences.” Now he tried a different tack, one he’d hinted at in his letter. “It’s not fair that you keep your stake in the company,” he said. He made a lowball offer for my stock: five dollars a share.

... “I’m not sure I’m willing to sell,” I countered, “but I wouldn’t even discuss less than $10 a share.”

“No way,” Bill said, as I’d suspected he would. Our talk was over. As it turned out, Bill’s conservatism worked to my advantage. If he’d been willing to offer something close to my asking price, I would have sold way too soon.

Misers' methods for reading the NYTimes

Some people have pointed out to me that I am the cheapest (as in most miserly) person they know in my net worth category. I plead guilty.

The Times wants to charge me $35/month for unlimited digital access (that means on multiple devices, like mobile, tablet, computer). Now, I'm all for supporting journalism, and the Times in particular, but it seems kind of high to me. Let's see how it all works out for the Grey Lady. Perhaps a micropayment scheme would be better? (Has Google rolled their version out yet?)

Apparently they won't limit access to articles reached via link (i.e., from blogs, Twitter, search engine; see below for more details). This is strategic: they want their articles to be read, and to be influential, so don't want to frustrate potential readers who arrive via search or social network.

Therefore, I think you can just type the following into Google to get (free) access to daily NYTimes content (up to 5 articles per day; see note at bottom):

site:nytimes.com < today's date > < keywords >

i.e.,

site:nytimes.com march 29 2011 japan reactor

or

site:nytimes.com 2011/03/29 japan reactor

Soon someone will write a little web or mobile app to do exactly this kind of thing, mashing a nice graphical display with links that connect via Google or Twitter or whatever. Hmm ...

Here is a Twitter feed someone has already put up for this purpose. See also links in comments below.



*** It looks like search engine links are only good for 5 articles a day:

9. Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, search engines or my blog?

Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you've already read your 20 free articles.

Like other external links, links from search engine results will count toward your monthly limit. If you have reached your monthly limit, you'll have a daily limit of 5 free articles through a given search engine. This limit applies to the majority of search engines.

Statins, cholesterol and medical science

Do statins work? Does high cholesterol cause heart disease? Are people who doubt the conventional wisdom on these two topics excessively skeptical conspiracy wonks? Or is big pharma pulling a fast one on the public by pushing statins?

See also this paper which is mentioned in the article below and which summarizes results of studies from 2008-2010 (response by authors to criticism). See here for earlier discussion on the overall quality of medical research.

MedConnect: ... Dr. Kausik K. Ray of the University of Cambridge (England) and his associates performed a meta-analysis of 11 randomized controlled trials that assessed the effects on all-cause mortality of statins versus a placebo or control therapies on all-cause mortality. They restricted their analysis to data on high-risk patients with no known cardiovascular disease and included previously unpublished data, “to provide the most robust information to date” on statins as primary prevention in this patient group.

The metaanalysis involved 65,229 men and women in predominantly Western populations, with approximately 244,000 person-years of follow-up. There were 2,793 deaths during an average of 4 years of follow-up.

All-cause mortality was not significantly different between patients taking statins and those taking placebo or control therapies. This suggests that “the all-cause mortality reduction of 20% reported in JUPITER is likely to be an extreme and exaggerated finding, as often occurs when trials are stopped early,” Dr. Ray and his colleagues said (Arch. Intern. Med. 2010;170;1,024-31).

This meta-analysis shows that statin therapy as primary prevention in high-risk patients is less beneficial than is generally perceived, and it can be inferred to be even less helpful in low-risk patients, they added.

We're different on the inside

Hmm... I wonder how many pounds of gooey visceral fat are encasing my internal organs? Good thing I just got back from the gym :-)

I'm quasi-paleo and refuse to take statins. Any advice?

NPR: ... The Afghan soldiers, police and civilians he treated in Kandahar had radically different bodies from those of the Canadians he took care of back home.

"Typical Afghan civilians and soldiers would have been 140 pounds or so as adults. And when we operated on them, what we were aware of was the absence of any fat or any adipose tissue underneath the skin," Patterson says. "Of course, when we operated on Canadians or Americans or Europeans, what was normal was to have most of the organs encased in fat. It had a visceral potency to it when you could see it directly there."

... "Type 2 diabetes historically didn't exist, only 70 or 80 years ago," says Patterson. "And what's driven it, of course, is this rise in obesity, especially the accumulation of abdominal fat. That fat induces changes in our receptors that cells have for insulin. Basically, it makes them numb to the effect of insulin."

For a long time, the human body can compensate — the pancreas secretes even larger amounts of insulin, which regulates blood sugar levels. But over time, the pancreas begins to fail to secrete enough insulin, and that is when diabetes develops.

He explains that the increase in abdominal fat has driven the epidemic of diabetes over the last 40 years in the developed world — and that he's now seeing similar patterns in undeveloped regions that have adapted Western eating patterns.

See also the essay below.

Maisonneuve: ... Excessive fattiness is precisely why, when caring for the critically ill in North America, glucose levels are tightly controlled with insulin—a procedure necessary even for those not thought to be diabetic. Stressed by the infection, or the operation that has brought us to the intensive care unit, our sugar levels rise, paralyzing our white blood cells and nourishing the bacteria chewing upon them. But it was never necessary to give the Afghans insulin, no matter how shattered they were.

Among North American adults, 40 percent of us maintain normal glucose levels only by secreting larger than normal quantities of insulin from our pancreas. So we wander in and out of our family doctors’ offices and, if some blood work is done, we are reassured that our glucose levels are normal, that we don’t have diabetes. Mostly, they are and mostly, we don’t. But our bodies are not normal. The Afghans’ bodies are normal. We are so commonly ill we take it to be normal.

Here is our normal: 40 percent of North American adults have metabolic syndrome. The syndrome is caused by being fat, even at levels North Americans would not recognize as abnormal. Obesity prompts the receptors that insulin acts upon to become numb to its effects. As we grow fatter, and insulin resistance proceeds, higher and higher levels of insulin are necessary to get the sugar out of the blood. Eventually, overt diabetes may supervene, as it has for 8 percent of North American adults, a tenfold increase since the turn of the last century. But even prior to the development of diabetes, metabolic syndrome insidiously eats away at the bodies of those it affects.

Metabolic syndrome’s elevated insulin level is why we order a second Whopper; getting fatter, cruelly, stimulates our appetite. It is also why high blood pressure is more common among Westerners, too, and why our cholesterol panels are more alarming. Ultimately and especially, it is why heart attacks are almost unknown among traditional peoples like the Pashtun, while half of us will spend our last minutes with the impression that a large kitchen appliance is sitting on our chests.

TEDxCaltech

Sorry if you've seen this already, I totally missed it until just now. Here is their web page, with links to lots of video.

Warning: massive doses of Feynman idolatry!

I particularly liked Tony Hey's Feynman and Computation and Lenny Susskind's talk, which mentions liquid helium and partons.

Annals of socially constructed gender roles

A typical conversation between my five year old twins. Guess which is the boy and which is the girl!

I: Let's play with my dolls.

M: You never want to play anything fun!

I: Like what?

M: Like guns, robots or dinosaurs!

Yesterday M asked me why in all the stories the prince does the fighting and the princess always needs rescuing. Unsure, I consulted mommy, who has a PhD in comparative literature from Berkeley. The answer is, apparently, that in the old days princesses were weak and so the princes had to do the fighting. Nowadays (as you can see on TV in Afghanistan) princesses can take care of themselves. M was very confused by this and keeps asking me why the princesses used to be so weak: did an evil wizard do it?