Khan Academy and online learning

Two math professors critique the Khan Academy in the video below. See also the excerpted Chronicle article.

An earlier post on online learning and the future of higher education.


 

Chronicle of Higher Education: ... Khan Academy is a collection of video lectures that give demonstrations of mechanical processes. When it comes to this purpose, KA videos are, on the average, pretty good. Sal Khan is the main reason; he is approachable and has a knack for making mechanical processes seem understandable. Of course, his videos are not perfect. He tends to ramble a lot and get sidetracked; he doesn’t use visuals as effectively as he could; he’s often sloppy and sometimes downright wrong with his math; and he sometimes omits topics from his subjects that really need to be there (LU decomposition in linear algebra, for example). But on balance, KA is a great resource for the niche in which it was designed to work: giving demonstrations of mechanical processes. ... 

This is not to say that Khan Academy can’t play a useful role in learning calculus or some other subject. I don’t deny that mechanical skill is important for getting to the higher-level cognitive tasks. But mechanical skill is a proper subset of the set of all tasks a student needs to master in order to really learn a subject. And a lecture, when well done, can teach novice learners how to think like expert learners; but in my experience with Khan Academy videos, this isn’t what happens — the videos are demos on how to finish mathematics exercises, with little modeling of the higher-level thinking skills that are so important for using mathematics in the real world. So the kinds of learning objectives that Khan Academy videos focus on are important — but they’re not enough.

I tried out a couple of Khan Academy videos on my kids recently and I thought they were reasonably effective. Khan is not as precise as a real math professor but he gets the message across.

Small nitpick: he referred to negative numbers as "smaller" than positive or less negative numbers (e.g., -100 is "smaller" than 1), which is I think confusing and even a bit misleading. I think he should have used "less than" rather than "smaller". If you are familiar with complex numbers then you'll probably tend to think in terms of a magnitude (big vs small) and an orientation (with negative numbers along the theta = pi direction), so that -100 is not really small (in magnitude) relative to 1. Presumably Khan learned complex analysis at some point in his education (although maybe not, he went to MIT ;-) IIRC he started out wanting to do physics.

Rare variants and human genetic diversity

You may have read that there is more genetic variation within major ethnic groups than between ethnic groups. That this precludes the possibility of group differences is Lewontin's Fallacy (explained in pictures).

Deep sequencing of the human genome, which reveals rare variants (here, defined as those found in fewer than 0.5 percent of the population), shows that there is actually more variation between groups than within groups. (So what you may have been taught in school is not true -- sorry, that's how science works sometimes.) The figure below, from this July 6 Science article, shows that over 50 percent of rare genetic variants are found in African populations (which have greater genetic diversity) but not in European populations. About 41 percent of all rare variants are found only in Europeans and not in Africans, and only 9 percent of the variants are common to both groups.

These rare variants are likely recent mutations. Unsurprisingly, they differ in populations that have been geographically separated for tens of thousands of years.

The excerpt below is from this paper, in the same issue of Science.

Because rare variants are typically the result of recent mutations, they are expected to be geographically clustered or even private to specific populations. Using a measure of variant sharing between two samples (7), we found that for common variants, any two European populations appear to be panmictic, whereas for rare variants, European populations show lower levels of sharing (fig. S7). In general, the level of sharing depends on geographic distance, with the dependence increasing substantially with decreasing allele frequency (fig. S8). The Finnish population shows substantially lower levels of sharing with other European populations than predicted by geographic distance, which is consistent with hypotheses of a historical Finnish demographic bottleneck (23). Levels of rare variant sharing are even lower when comparing populations from distinct continents. Thus, catalogs of rare variants will need to be generated locally across the globe. 

We found substantial variation in the total abundance of variants across populations, even within Europe (Fig. 3 and fig. S7D), which is likely due to demographic history. In particular, we observed a north-south gradient in the abundance of rare variants across Europe, with increased numbers of rare variants in Southern Europe and a very small number of variants among Finns, who had about one third as many variants as southern Europeans.

There seems to be a correlation between latitude and prevalence of rare variants. Could mutation rates vary due to average temperature?

Child probabilist

I was playing a board game with the little guy and he was convinced he had developed a better method to roll the die. I asked him to check that his method actually works, so he obtained the distribution below. His number sense and intuition for probability are unusual for a six year old. He can do things I certainly could not when I was his age, but on the other hand he's had somewhat better instruction  :^)

At this point he doesn't know how to interpret the results of his statistical tests. He did tell me that if his dice rolling method didn't work then each row of marks would be the same. I wasn't there when he obtained this data.

See also Bounded Cognition.

The Hedge Fund Mirage

Bounded rationality even for the most "sophisticated" capital allocators of all: pension funds, wealthy individuals, private wealth managers. Financial services are incorrectly priced, both by sophisticated investors, and by society.

See also The truth about venture capital.

If you are interested in a sick story, search on Alphonse Fletcher or on Alphonse Fletcher chair gates west pao  :-(

Economist: “The Hedge Fund Mirage” attacks the Wall Street worshippers’ blind adulation. Simon Lack, who spent 23 years at JPMorgan, an investment bank, selecting hedge funds to invest in, grew tired of the free hand that investors all too often gave managers. He has written a provocative book questioning a central tenet of the hedge-fund industry: its performance is always worth paying for. The promise of superior performance is wrong, he says. Of course some investors make a killing, but on average hedge funds have underperformed even risk-free Treasury bills. This is because the bulk of investors’ capital has flooded in over the past ten years, whereas hedge funds performed best when the industry was smaller than it is now. What is more, it is hard to know how hedge funds actually fare, since indices that track industry performance tend to overstate the returns. Funds that do badly or implode are not usually included in the indices at all.  

Why would any client continue to pay for such mediocre returns? One reason is that hedge-fund managers are incredibly good salesmen. In addition, industry insiders who are all too aware of hedge funds’ shortcomings choose not to expose them, Mr Lack argues. Moreover, the common fee structure, in which hedge-fund managers keep 2% of assets as a “management” fee to cover expenses and 20% of profits generated by performance, has made many managers rich, but not their clients. Mr Lack calculates that hedge-fund managers have kept around 84% of profits generated, with investors only getting 16% since 1998. “Where are the customers’ yachts?” is the title of one chapter. What is worse, the disastrous dive of equity markets in 2008 may have wiped out all the profits that hedge funds have ever generated for investors.  

Mr Lack places a good deal of the blame for this on investors who fail to ask tough enough questions and have not grasped that they “want yesterday’s returns without yesterday’s risk”. They invest money with the biggest, best-known funds “that look nothing like those whose aggregate performance” they want to emulate. Instead investors should stand up to managers, negotiate more favourable terms and put their money into smaller funds, which tend to perform better.

Whole genome cancer therapy

This Times story describes a cancer therapy made successful by whole genome sequencing of the patient and his cancer cells. Ultimately, RNA sequencing indicated a particular gene (FLT3) might be involved, and luckily for the patient a drug inhibitor was available.

Genotyping was probably not the most expensive part of this treatment. The drug itself costs $300 per day, whereas whole genome sequencing is down to a few thousand dollars for fairly good coverage. The resource that is scarcest is probably the expertise for analyzing the results and planning the treatment.

NYTimes: ... Researchers differ about how soon the method, known as whole genome sequencing, will be generally available and paid for by insurance — estimates range from a few years to a decade or so. But they believe that it has enormous promise, though it has not yet cured anyone. 

With a steep drop in the costs of sequencing and an explosion of research on genes, medical experts expect that genetic analyses of cancers will become routine. Just as pathologists do blood cultures to decide which antibiotics will stop a patient’s bacterial infection, so will genome sequencing determine which drugs might stop a cancer. “Until you know what is driving a patient’s cancer, you really don’t have any chance of getting it right,” Dr. Ley said. “For the past 40 years, we have been sending generals into battle without a map of the battlefield. What we are doing now is building the map.” 

Large drug companies and small biotechs are jumping in, starting to test drugs that attack a gene rather than a tumor type. Leading cancer researchers are starting companies to find genes that might be causing an individual’s cancer to grow, to analyze genetic data and to find and test new drugs directed against these genetic targets. Leading venture capital firms are involved. 

For now, whole genome sequencing is in its infancy and dauntingly complex. The gene sequences are only the start — they come in billions of small pieces, like a huge jigsaw puzzle. The arduous job is to figure out which mutations are important, a task that requires skill, experience and instincts. 

So far, most who have chosen this path are wealthy and well connected. When Steve Jobs had exhausted other options to combat pancreatic cancer, he consulted doctors who coordinated his genetic sequencing and analysis. It cost him $100,000, according to his biographer. The writer Christopher Hitchens went to the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, who advised him on where to get a genetic analysis of his esophageal cancer.

Nice guys finish last

Careful observation suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top  ;-)

The negative correlation between agreeableness and earnings is also established here.

NY Magazine: ... T. Byram Karasu, a psychiatrist at Albert Einstein/Montefiore Medical Center who treats wealthy clients, believes all very successful people share certain fundamental character traits. They have above-average intelligence, street smarts, and a high tolerance for anxiety. “They are sexual and aggressive,” he says. “They are also competitive with anyone and have no fear of confrontations; in fact, they thrive on them. And in contrast to their image, they are not extroverted. They become charmingly engaging when needed, but in their private world, they are private people.” They are, in the parlance, all business. 

Earlier this year, researchers led by Timothy Judge at Notre Dame went some way toward proving Karasu’s observation when they published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “Do Nice Guys—And Gals—Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income.” The paper explored, in part, the financial penalties that women suffer in the workplace for being perceived as pushovers. But it also found a strong correlation, especially dramatic in men, between disagreeableness and income. Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Then they were given an agreeableness score. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; those with the highest agreeableness earned $31,259. Disagreeableness was also correlated to job responsibility and recommendations for the management track. ... 

Piff’s most notorious research seemed to demonstrate the extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them. Last year, he spent three months hanging out at the ­intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway, near the Berkeley Marina. ... Piff and his research team would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs near the Sea Breeze Market and Deli, and catalogue the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (Five would be a new-model Mercedes, say, and one would be an old, battered Honda like the one Piff drives.) Then the researchers would observe the drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a complete stop—a violation, he reminds readers in his PNAS study, of the ­California ­Vehicle Code. “Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex, and amount of traffic.” When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers’ regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering. ... fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. “It’s like they didn’t even see them,” Piff told me. 

... Looking at the data from the heart monitors, Stellar found a direct, negative correlation in biological terms between class and compassion. “Lower-class individuals showed greater heart-rate deceleration in response to the suffering of others,” Stellar wrote. The heart rates of the upper-class subjects generally did not change. 

... The American Dream is really two dreams. There’s the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there’s the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus’s work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken. (Research shows that the rich tend to blame individuals for their own failure and likewise credit themselves for their own success, whereas those in the lower classes find explanations for inequality in circumstances and events outside their control.)

Hacker hostels

When I started my first company we rented a huge house in N. Berkeley (which we called the Geek House, or Geek Haus) and furnished it in one shot (beds, desks, tables, lamps, dressers) with a mega trip to Ikea. The coders lived in the house, generally one or two to a room, and the downstairs had a server room and rows of workstations. The whole thing was wired with ethernet (pre-Wifi!) and the garage was filled with computers. We even had mats in the back to practice BJJ and a pullup bar (I tied another Berkeley physics PhD named Aram in the pullup contest with 18). What else could anyone ask for? When we closed a bigger VC round we got some real office space in Emeryville next to the Siebel building.

I actually never lived in the Geek House. My girlfriend and I rented a 3500 square foot house in the Piedmont hills from a Berkeley chemistry professor who was on sabbatical. From the decks and patio you could see SF, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. If you ever get a chance to live in the Berkeley hills don't turn it down :-)

NYTimes: This is not some kind of dorm, but a “hacker hostel.” It’s one of several in the Bay Area that offer short- or long-term stays for aspiring tech entrepreneurs on the bottom rung of the Silicon Valley ladder, those who haven’t yet achieved Facebook-level riches. These establishments put a twist on the long tradition of communal housing for tech types by turning it into a commercial enterprise. 

The San Francisco hostel is part of a minichain of three bunk-bed-stuffed residences under the same management, all places where young programmers, designers and scientists can work, eat and sleep. 

These are not so different from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants. But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent — $40 a night — as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping. And potential tenants are screened to make sure they will contribute to the mix. Justin Carden, a 29-year-old software engineer who is staying in another hostel, in Menlo Park, while working on a biotech start-up, talks about the place as if it were Stanford. 

“The intellectual stimulation you get from being here is unparalleled,” Mr. Carden said. “If you’re wanting to do something to change the world and make it a fundamentally better place, you need to be around the right people.”

Notice how idealistic Mr. Carden is. His goal is to change the world by creating something great -- not to earn a seven-figure bonus by ripping the face off a muppet (client)  ;-)

Compare to Foo Camp.

Chomsky: genetic barriers to scientific progress

Chomsky on the limits of human intelligence. Although I don't agree completely with Chomsky, trying to explain the Higgs boson to non-physicists (even, to non-particle physicists) makes me sympathetic to his perspective.

I do think the rate of progress in science is partially limited by the availability of human capital. If we had more and better human capital we could advance much faster. See Plenty of room at the top.

QUESTION: Do you think genetic barriers to further progress are becoming obvious in some areas of art and science? 

CHOMSKY: You could give an argument that something like this has happened in quite a few fields. It was possible in the late nineteenth century for an intelligent person of much leisure and wealth to be about as much at home as he wanted to be in the arts and sciences. But forty years later that goal had become hopeless. ... 

I think it has happened in physics and mathematics, for example. There's this idea, which goes back to the French mathematicians known collectively as Bourbaki, that the development of mathematics was originally the exploration of everyday intuitions of space and number. That is probably somewhat true through the end of the nineteenth century. But I don't think it's true now. As for physics, in talking to students at MIT, I notice that many of the very brightest ones, who would have gone into physics twenty years ago, are now going into biology. I think part of the reason for this shift is that there are discoveries to be made in biology that are within the range of an intelligent human being. This may not be true in other areas. 

QUESTION: You seem to be saying two things. First, that whatever defines our common human nature will turn out to be a shared set of intuitions that owe much of their strength and character to our common genetic heritage -- our species genotype. Second, that the exhaustion of these intuitions in many areas is producing a peculiar kind of artistic and scientific specialization. Further progress in music or mathematics, for example, requires a scientist or artist with an unusual heredity. [[ It's called g, it's heritable and it's normally distributed in the population ...  So, yes, high g corresponds to "unusual heredity" ... ]]

CHOMSKY: Well, it's a different mental constitution -- something like being a chess freak or a runner who can do a three-and-one-half minute mile. It's almost a matter of logic that this change is going to occur sooner or later. Has it happened already? That's a matter of judgment. It's a matter of looking at, say, the twentieth century and seeing whether there are signs of this change. Is it the case, for example, that contemporary work in the arts and sciences is no longer part of our common aesthetic and intellectual experience? Well, there are signs. But whether the signs are realistic or whether we are just going through a sort of sea change and something will develop, who knows? Maybe a thousand years from now we'll know.

Chomsky may not be aware of it, but many physicists had doubts that humans could understand atoms and quantum mechanics:

Wigner: Until 1925, most great physicists, including Einstein and Planck, had doubted that man could truly grasp the deepest implications of quantum theory. They really felt that man might be too stupid to properly describe quantum phenomena. ...the men at the weekly colloquium in Berlin wondered "Is the human mind gifted enough to extend physics into the microscopic domain ...?" Many of those great men doubted that it could.

Higgs boson explained

In preparation for a possible discovery announcement...

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Whither higher education?

John Hennessey (Stanford president) and Salman Khan (Khan Academy) discuss higher education and digital technology.

Learning or Credentialing? Signaling or Sorting?


 


Some comments:

 1. Internet technology can enhance learning. However, I think the largest impact will be on cognitively gifted or very motivated individuals who will be able to accelerate their education (see, e.g., Khan Academy). For average students, the main barriers to learning have to do with self-motivation and I am not sure that streaming video of lectures, or even a virtual classroom environment which allows rich interaction, will provide better stimulus than the traditional lecture. It seems to me that my intro students have trouble paying attention even when I am literally dancing around at the front of the class, telling jokes and working through elaborate physics demonstrations (which often include explosions or bouncing balls or colorful animations). Moving the lectures online will be cheaper, but not necessarily better -- a win for efficiency, perhaps, but no solution for the difficulty that the average individual has in mastering challenging material.

Ask yourself what the ideal learning environment would be for your child if cost were no object. I think it might be the Oxbridge tutorial system, where a real expert devotes their full attention to training a small number of students (perhaps even a single individual) in great depth. Almost as good would be training in an environment where the student to faculty ratio is low, and the faculty are very focused on pedagogy. Interactions with peers of similar (or superior) ability are as important as those with the tutor/instructor. This ideal limit is quite far from the online systems currently envisaged. Is America too poor to provide this old-fashioned but superior education to (say) the top 10 percent of students? I doubt it.

At the highest quality levels, educational productivity has increased little in the last 100 years. We might improve things around the edges by, say, having lectures from the top scholars available online, along with tools enabling students from different universities to exchange ideas and answer each other's questions. But I don't think we'll see substantive productivity improvement here until we -- gulp -- solve the AI problem and create robot genius professors. Only a small number of students could crowd around Feynman at Caltech's Physics X to hear him explain the EPR paradox. I don't expect that to change anytime soon. (You can record Feynman's comments about EPR; you can't allow thousands of students around the world to interact with him one on one.)


2. Credentialing is complex and even the system we have had in place for several generations is not well understood either by students or by employers. What are the key factors that employers need to determine about an applicant? Intelligence (reasonably well measured by simple tests; but even this is not widely acknowledged in broader society), Conscientiousness (difficult to measure without actually putting someone through a challenging program over a period of years), Ambition/Drive (similar to Conscientiousness), and finally: Creativity, Adaptability and Interpersonal Skills -- all extremely difficult to measure.

I am not sure that Internet technologies will really improve our Credentialing capabilities. We already have testing centers, GRE subject exams, Actuarial exams, narrow skill certifications like Microsoft MCSE, etc. It's more a matter of cultural attitudes than anything else -- when will employers start accepting a high SAT score and some narrow skill certification in place of, say, an engineering degree from a well-known university? Has anyone done systematic research on the relative validities (predictive power) of different kinds of certification for a wide variety of employment settings? I only know of results for general cognitive ability (g).

Plenty of room at the top

Feynman once said there's Plenty of room at the bottom (nanotechnology).

In the context of human genetics, it's clear there's plenty of room at the top -- possibly as much as +30 SDs based on existing variance in the human population! (Compare to the result of selection in maize.) This is the last slide from my BGA 2012 talk:

At some point I may be able to post the audio, as all the talks were recorded. The slides may be a bit hard to understand on their own.

Finance and the allocation of human capital

How finance sucks human capital from more productive activities. FT Alphaville:

... a bloated financial sector can also suck in more than its share of talent, hampering the development of other sectors.8

That last sentence is a smack in the face, isn’t it? FT Alphaville was dying to know what Footnote 8 would contain.

Here it is:

8 See S Cecchetti and E Kharroubi, “Reassessing the impact of finance on growth”, BIS, January 2012, mimeo

So we looked it up. From the introduction:

… in our examination of industry-level data, we find that industries that are in competition for resources with finance are particularly damaged by financial booms. Specifically, we show that manufacturing sectors that are either R&D-intensive or dependent on external finance suffer disproportionate reductions in productivity growth when finance booms.

At first, these results may seem surprising. After all, a more developed financial system is supposed to reduce transaction costs, raising investment directly, as well as improve the distribution of capital and risk across the economy. 1 These two channels, through the level and composition of investment, are the mechanisms by which financial development improves growth. 2 But the financial industry competes for resources with the rest of the economy. It requires not only physical capital, in the form of buildings, computers and the like, but highly skilled workers as well. Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry. The result is that erstwhile scientists, people who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers.

See also my earlier post A reallocation of human capital (pre-financial crisis).

Edinburgh 2

This is the physics building at Edinburgh University, where I gave a talk:

A portrait of Peter Higgs:

The opening reception for BGA 2012:

BGA talks at the Royal College of Physicians:

Archival interview with twins research pioneer Tom Bouchard:

Robert Plomin on twins and modern SNP-based heritability:

My last evening in beautiful Edinburgh:

Eating disorder

Financial Weaponry

Financial Weaponry, my review of George Szpiro's Pricing the Future: Physics, Finance and the 300-year Journey to the Black–Scholes Equation, is now available at the Physics World site.

I posted some excerpts earlier here.

Edinburgh

The sun came out today!

Intellectual tourism

Greetings from Edinburgh. I'm here for ICQG 2012 and BGA 2012.

What could be more fun than exploring a new world?  :-)

Not yet

Am I the only one who finds these results surprising?

What were they discussing?

Von Neumann, Feynman and Ulam, back in the day. (Probably Santa Fe or Los Alamos.)


 

Some Ulam quotes from his autobiography Adventures of a Mathematician.

One of the luckiest accidents of my life happened the day G. D. Birkhoff came to tea at von Neumann's house while I was visiting there. We talked and, after some discussion of mathematical problems, he turned to me and said, “There is an organization at Harvard called the Society of Fellows. It has a vacancy. There is about one chance in four that if you were interested and applied you might receive this appointment."

I came to the Society of Fellows during its first few years of existence ... I was given a two-room suite in Adams House, next door to another new fellow in mathematics by the name of John Oxtoby ... He was interested in some of the same mathematics I was: in set theoretical topology, analysis, and real function theory.

... While l was at Harvard, Johnny came to see me a few times and I invited him to dinner at the Society of Fellows. We would also take automobile drives and trips together during which we discussed everything from mathematics to literature and talked without interruption while still paying attention to our surroundings. Johnny liked this kind of travel very much.

... Edward [Teller] took up my suggestions, hesitantly at first, but enthusiastically after a few hours. ... Teller lost no time in presenting these ideas ... at a ... meeting in Princeton which was to become quite famous because it marked the turning point in the development of the H-bomb.

... It seems to me this was the tragedy of Oppenheimer. He was more intelligent, receptive, and brilliantly critical than deeply original. ... Perhaps he exaggerated his role when he saw himself as the "Prince of Darkness, the destroyer of Universes." Johnny used to say, "Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin."

... Banach once told me, "Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems or theories, the very best ones see analogies between analogies." Gamow possessed this ability to see analogies between models for physical theories to an almost uncanny degree ... It was along the great lines of the foundations of physics in cosmology and in the recent discoveries in molecular biology that his ideas played an important role. His pioneering work in explaining the radioactive decay of atoms was followed by his theory of the explosive beginning of the universe, the “big bang" theory (he disliked the term by the way) and the subsequent formation of galaxies.

University of Edinburgh: Introduction to Technology Startups

The afternoon of June 20 we have a break from ICQG 2012 (International Conference on Quantitative Genetics). I'll be giving a talk at the University of Edinburgh, in case anyone is interested. Both Charles Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell started their higher education at Edinburgh. It's quite an honor to give a lecture in the James Clerk Maxwell Building! :-)

Mmmm... doughnuts!

 

Roberts Funded Lecture

Introduction to technology startups

Steve Hsu

Professor of Theoretical Physics & Director, Institute for Theoretical Science

University of Oregon

Wednesday 20 June 2012 from 1600

All welcome!

In the past, applied research and development was concentrated at corporate labs like Bell, IBM, Xerox PARC, etc. Today, innovation is more likely to be found at small venture capital backed companies founded by creative risk takers. The odds have never been greater that you, a scientist or engineer, might someday work at (or found!) a startup company. The talk is an introduction to this important and dynamic part of our economy, from the perspective of a physics professor and serial entrepreneur.

Lecture Theatre C, School of Physics & Astronomy, James Clerk Maxwell Building, Kings Buildings

Doughnuts and coffee at 1600

Talk 1630-1730

ICQG and BGA 2012

In a week I'll be attending ICQG 2012 (International Conference on Quantitative Genetics) and BGA 2012 (annual meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association), both in Edinburgh. If you want to meet up, let me know!

The title of my talk is Some results on the genetic architecture of human intelligence. I will post my slides on the blog at some point. For now, here are a few (click for larger versions).

As a physicist and quantum mechanic it is natural for me to think about a genome as a vector in a very high dimensional space. Geometrical notions follow ...

Pricing the Future

My review of George Szpiro's Pricing the Future: Physics, Finance and the 300-year Journey to the Black–Scholes Equation is in this month's Physics World. I'll post a link to the review itself if and when they make an ungated version available. Until then you'll have to content yourself with the excerpts below (click for larger version). See related post with some notes I made for the review.

Financial Weaponry 

Almost every physicist or mathematician below a certain age knows a former colleague or classmate who now works in finance. Older scientists, however, can probably remember a time before such “quants” existed. What happened to create this new and lucrative profession over the course of a few decades? 

... Since the payoff depends on future events, any pricing model must include, at minimum, a probability distribution over future outcomes. But in fact the problem is more subtle, because the value of a given probability distribution of future payouts to a particular individual depends on that individual’s attitude towards risk. ... 

... but experts are violently divided on the more general societal utility of advances in derivatives theory and practice. The conventional view, taught in business schools and in economics departments, is that financial innovation enables economic dynamism and allows markets to allocate resources more efficiently. The opposing perspective, held by none other than billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is that derivatives are "financial weapons of mass destruction" -- speculative instruments in a complex global casino that carry more risk than benefit. When Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, bought the reinsurance firm General Re in 1998, the latter had 23,000 derivative contracts. Buffett later explained his attitude towards these contracts to a US government panel: “I could have hired 15 of the smartest people, you know, math majors, PhDs. I could have given them carte blanche to devise any reporting system that would enable me to get my mind around what exposure that I had, and it wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “Can you imagine 23,000 contracts with 900 institutions all over the world, with probably 200 of them names I can’t pronounce?” Ultimately, Buffett decided to unwind the derivative deals, even though doing so incurred some $400 million in losses for Berkshire. 

The recent financial crises suggest that Buffett’s attitude may be the right one, and that the potential benefits of derivatives and other complex instruments come with dangerous systemic risks. At a recent meeting to address post-crisis financial reforms, the former chief of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, commented: “I wish somebody would give me some shred of evidence linking financial innovation with a benefit to the economy.” In Pricing the Future, Szpiro gives us a colourful history of derivatives, but does little to address Volcker’s fundamental question.

Look up, not down!

Our biggest astrophysics projects are a rounding error in the spook budget.

NYTimes: The phone call came like a bolt out of the blue, so to speak, in January 2011. On the other end of the line was someone from the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation’s fleet of spy satellites. They had some spare, unused “hardware” to get rid of. Was NASA interested? 

... Sitting in a clean room in upstate New York were a pair of telescopes the same size as the famed Hubble Space Telescope, but which had been built to point down at the Earth, instead of up at the heavens. 

... to turn one of the telescopes loose on the cosmos, pointing in its rightful direction, outward, to investigate the mysterious dark energy that is speeding up the expansion of the universe. If the plan succeeds — and Congress, the Office of Management and Budget and the Academy of Sciences have yet to sign on — it could shave hundreds of millions of dollars and several years off a quest that many scientists say is the most fundamental of our time and that NASA had said it could not undertake until 2024 at the earliest.

12.87 110H in Eugene

The Nike Prefontaine Classic was in Eugene yesterday. The wife and kids went but I'm not that big on live sports. We'll have the Olympic trials here later in the summer.

Liu Xiang tied the world record at 12.87, but it was ruled wind-aided at +2.4m/s. This field was world class, only missing current world record holder Dayron Robles of Cuba. David Oliver, the US record holder, was a WR at Howard and is huge for a hurdler at around 200 lbs. Ashton Eaton, in lane 1, is a top decathlete who competed at U Oregon as a collegian. My kids got to play dodgeball with him a few years ago :-)

At the end of his victory lap Liu ends up among women competitors preparing for the start of the 3000m. He looks gigantic in comparison.


 


 I often run at Hayward Field, but not as fast :-(

Culture, Communism, and China's Modern Consumer

Tom Doctoroff, an ad man working in Shanghai, has good insights into modern Chinese culture. This interview with Leonard Lopate is worth a listen:

ChinaSmack: ... After 13 years here, I am fundamentally convinced that there is a unifying “Confucian” conflict — between self-protection and status projection — that brands have a fundamental role in resolving. Unlike practically any other country (Korea and Vietnam come closest), China is both boldly ambitious (ladders are meant to be climbed and meritocracy is a cherished value) and regimented, with hierarchical and procedural booby traps for anyone who hasn’t mastered the “system.” This tension between upward mobility and fear-based conformism shows up everywhere, in every business meeting, in every struggle with a mother-in-law, in every new generation release on the internet.