Michigan startups

Niowave, a Lansing company with roots in MSU's number 1 ranked nuclear physics program. The founder is shown smoking a cigar in the wedding photo here.

Startup event in Dan Gilbert's beautiful Madison building in downtown Detroit.

F > L > P > S

Andrei Sakharov with daughter, 1948.

Excerpts below from The World of Andrei Sakharov (link goes to full text) by Gennady Gorelik. See Out on the tail for a discussion of Landau's logarithmic ranking of physicists.

(p.159) Discussing Tamm’s desire that Landau be his official dissertation opponent in his Memoirs, he remarked that the latter “fortunately, refused; I would have felt very awkward because I realized the dissertation’s inadequacies.” Sakharov also talked about his failure in pure physics in the summer of 1947, and how Pomeranchuk (his dissertation opponent) did “a hatchet job” on the same problem, while Landau dealt with it “in an elegant and productive way.” This gave Sakharov the basis to humbly “formulate a system of inequalities: L > P > S” (L for Landau, P for Pomeranchuk, S for Sakharov).

... Sakharov for some reason came to the Institute of Physical Problems, where Landau headed up the Theoretical Department and a separate group doing research and calculations for “the Problem.”

After we finished discussing our work, Landau and I walked out into the Institute garden. This was the only time we talked without witnesses, heart-to-heart. He said: “I really don’t like all this.” (The context was nuclear weapons in general and his participation in this work in particular.)
“Why?” I asked somewhat naively.
“Too much fuss.”
Landau usually smiled a lot and easily, baring his large teeth, but this time he was sad, even mournful.

Landau on the Soviet nuclear weapons effort:

(p.190, quote from 1952-3) "One must use all one’s strength not to get involved in the thick of atomic work. But one has to be very careful refusing it . . . If it weren’t for Box Five [Jewish ethnicity], I would not be doing special [nuclear-weaponry] work, but pure science, in which I now lag behind. The special work gives me a certain amount of personal security. But it’s far from my serving 'for the good of the Homeland' ... I have been reduced to the level of a “scientist slave” and this defines it all."

... Zeldovich was close enough to Landau to know how he felt about this work. Zeldovich considered Landau his teacher, and it was on Landau’s recommendation that Zeldovich was elected Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences. However, in the early 1950s, Landau berated Zeldovich with the foulest possible language when the latter attempted to drag him more deeply into secret work in spite of his unwillingness.

On Sakharov and Zeldovich.  Gorelik interprets events surrounding the development of the Soviet H-bomb as I did in the earlier post: Sakharov's Third Idea.

(p.188) From an eyewitness: These two prominent theorists had very different “styles of thinking.” Sakharov was characterized by inventiveness and great profundity while Zeldovich by very quick thinking and high erudition. These scientists created an extraordinarily creative climate; the Institute [Installation] became orphaned after their departure at the end of the 1960s.

Another eyewitness recalls how interesting it was to follow the discussion of these outwardly opposite individuals: One was short in stature, bespectacled, rapid in his movements, and spoke clearly; the other was tall, languid, and spoke with a slight burr. But they were linked by sharp minds and enormous physical intuition. Mutual problems stimulated their thinking and they quickly grasped the crux of processes; hardly anyone managed to follow the course of their reasoning.

... Sakharov himself did not underestimate the heroism of what he had done. Twenty years later, when he received an invitation to come to the United States and lecture, his wife asked him what would interest him the most in America. By that time his imagination was already involved in cosmology and the physics of elementary particles, and he had an altogether different view of the government for which he had created thermonuclear weapons. However, he told his wife that he wanted very much to sit side by side with Ulam to compare the paths by which they had arrived at the same solution (it was in the 1970s, when the roles played by Ulam and Teller in creating the H-bomb were not clear).

Zeldovich admired Sakharov’s talent, treated him “extraordinarily carefully,” “timidly,” and said: “What am I? Now, Andrei, he’s something else!” According to another witness, Zeldovich said: “I can understand and take the measure of other physicists, but Andrei — he’s something else, something special."

The benevolence of financiers

Olivier Desbarres is (now former) head of Asia FX strategy at Barclays. Condolences to my friends in finance who have to work with people like this. Struggle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster!

(In anticipation of comments: yes, people from all walks of life have meltdowns, but anyone familiar with global finance can detect authentic banker arrogance in this guy...)

Careful observation reveals it's disproportionately sociopaths at (and near) the top.





What a tremendous misallocation of human capital. See The illusion of skill.

All In

This is creepy to watch given the recent news about Paula Broadwell's affair with (now former) CIA director Petraeus -- her husband is also in the video. Breaking news -- the FBI got involved when Broadwell threatened another woman close to Petraeus via email.

It's disproportionately sociopaths at (and near) the top -- see also Lance Armstrong and Penn State scandal (especially the most recent grand jury presentment). If you watched this Daily Show segment when it first aired you probably thought Broadwell was a normal, even admirable, person. It's only under exceptional scrutiny (by the FBI, or other investigation with power to depose witnesses under oath) that the real truth comes out ...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Training days

Great training footage here of Carlos Condit and Georges St. Pierre. It's incredible how far MMA has come in the last 15 years. I'd say training methods of the top camps are as good as or better than in any other sport. The talent pool that MMA draws from still has a way to go, however. I think we'll see a lot more Jon Jones/GSP level pure athletes if the sport continues to progress.

I especially like the brief part near the end where John Danaher (Renzo blackbelt) is coaching GSP in BJJ, and what Firas (GSP head trainer) says to the team about going hard with the visiting Muay Thai world champion: don't go hard with this guy unless you want to end up in the hospital!

Broad Art Museum

Opening of the Broad Art Museum at MSU.

Senator Levin, Governor Snyder and Eli Broad.

Senator Levin and Eli Broad.

Global fashion equilibration

The timescale is now down to weeks, not seasons. See also Pronto moda and Globalization and high fashion (from 2005!).

NYTimes: ... The Zara headquarters is a huge airplane-hangar-size open space, with regional sales managers sitting at a line of desks running down the middle, designers on either side of them. The managers field calls from China or Chile to learn what’s selling, then they meet with the designers and decide whether there’s a trend. In this way, Inditex takes the fashion pulse of the world. “The manager will say, ‘My customers are asking for red trousers,’ and if it’s the same demand in Istanbul, New York and Tokyo, that means it’s a global trend, so they know to produce more red pants,” the P.R. person said.

I remarked that it must be interesting to see what is fashionable in Turkey but not in New York and vice versa. I imagined that different nationalities still had different tastes, at least in terms of fashion. But I was wrong.

“Actually, the customer is more or less the same in New York and Istanbul,” she said. “There are differences, like Brazilian girls like more brilliant colors, whereas in Paris they use more black. But in general when you find a fashion trend, it’s global.”

Earlier, Echevarría told me that neighborhoods share trends more than countries do. For example, the store on Fifth Avenue in Midtown New York “is more similar to the store in Ginza, Tokyo, which is an elegant area that’s also touristic,” he said. “And SoHo is closer to Shibuya, which is very trendy and young. Brooklyn now is a wildly trendy place to go, while Midtown — well, no New Yorker is actually shopping on Fifth Avenue now.” The buyers there are suburban tourists, he meant.

I recalled how I returned to my hipsterish Istanbul neighborhood after a trip to Brooklyn not long ago and discovered that the Turks were all also wearing those huge scarves wrapped around their necks eight times. I was surprised by how fast a style traveled across the globe, because I don’t see many Turks reading fashion magazines. But it isn’t just magazines that tell us what to wear. People like Ortega do. Or, more accurate, we tell each other, through the conduit of his Inditex stores and others like them.

... A trend can last a half a year, but some are finished in a month. “They thought that animal prints would finish by summer, but it kept going,” she said. “In the beginning of this season we had fluorescent colors. It was a trend in April and May, and it was very successful and then that was it.”

"They take students like you there."

The touching essay I quote from below is by Eddie Frenkel, a noted Berkeley mathematician. I recommend the whole thing. Eddie and I used to play in the regular Junior Fellows basketball game at Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center (MAC), where Spike Lee and Obama also played. I don't recall ever playing with Obama, but I do remember Spike, who was teaching a film class on campus. Spike is no baller, despite being such a big Knicks fan. For some reason I came up with the nickname "Kazakhstani Kid" for Eddie, which he never appreciated. During all the years I knew Eddie we never talked about anti-semitism. I did, however, hear such stories from Bob Nozick (from his Princeton years) and Stephen Greenblatt (Yale). They were, of course, from an earlier generation.

Perceptively, Nozick once asked me if I thought Asian-Americans were discriminated against by elite universities like Harvard. Perhaps he was aware of the 1990 investigation of Harvard by the Department of Education (our conversation would have been in the early 90s); I certainly was not. See also The bar is different.

New Criterion: ... It was 1984, my senior year at high school. I had to decide which university to apply to. Moscow had many schools, but there was only one place to study pure math: Moscow State University, known by its Russian abbreviation MGU, Moskovskiy Gosudarstvenny Universitet. Its famous Mekh-Mat, the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, was the flagship mathematics program of the USSR. Since I wanted to study pure math, I had no choice but to apply there.

Unlike the U.S., there are entrance exams to colleges in Russia. At Mekh-Mat there were four: written math, oral math, an essay on literature, and oral physics. I had, by then, progressed far beyond high school math, so it looked like I would sail through these exams.

But I was too optimistic. ...

“What’s your name?” she said by way of greeting.

“Eduard Frenkel.” (I used the Russian version of “Edward’’ in those days.)

“And you want to apply to MGU?”

“Yes.”

“Which Department?”

“Mekh-Mat.”

“I see.” She lowered her eyes and asked:

“And what’s your nationality?”

I said, “Russian.”

“Really? And what are your parents’ nationalities?”

“Well. . . . My mother is Russian.”

“And your father?”

“My father is Jewish.”

...

“Do you know that Jews are not accepted to Moscow University?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that you shouldn’t even bother to apply. Don’t waste your time. They won’t let you in.” ...

But Eddie tried anyway, to no avail.

... We walked out of the room and entered the elevator. The doors closed. It was just the two of us. The examiner was clearly in a good mood. He said:

“You did very well. A really impressive performance. I was wondering: did you go to a special math school?”

I grew up in a small town, we didn’t have special math schools.

“Really? Perhaps, your parents are mathematicians?”

No, they are engineers.

“Interesting. . . . It’s the first time I’ve seen such a strong student who did not go to a special math school.”

I couldn’t believe what he was saying. This man had just failed me after an unfairly administered, discriminatory, grueling five-hour exam. For all I knew, he had killed my dream of becoming a mathematician. A sixteen-year-old student, whose only fault was that he came from a Jewish family. And now this guy is giving me compliments and expecting me to open up to him?!

But what could I do? Yell at him, punch him in the face? I was just standing there, silent, stunned. He continued:

“Let me give you some advice. Apply to the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas. They have an Applied Mathematics program, which is quite good. They take students like you there.”

The elevator doors opened and a minute later he handed me my thick application folder, with a bunch of my school trophies and prizes oddly sticking out of it.

“Good luck to you,” he said, but I was too exhausted to respond. My only wish was to get the hell out of there!

And then I was outside, on the giant staircase of the immense MGU building. I was breathing fresh summer air again and hearing the sounds of the big city coming from a distance. It was getting dark, and there was almost no one around. I immediately spotted my parents who had been waiting anxiously for me on the steps this whole time. By the look on my face, and the big folder I was holding in my hands, they knew right away what had happened inside.

A reader sent me this list of deceptively simple "Jewish problems" used in oral exams at Moscow State University (MGU): http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556.

Hail to the quants, pundit fail

Pundit idiocracy: "Close race", "Too close to call", "Neck and neck". (I heard this all day long.)

Quants and data geeks: "Obama will win. Unlikely to be close."

From an earlier post High V, Low M:

high verbal ability ... is useful for appearing to be smart, or for winning arguments and impressing other people, but it's really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world -- that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.

... The statistical techniques used to analyze data obtained in a messy, complex world require mathematical ability to practice correctly. In almost all realistic circumstances hypothesis testing is intrinsically mathematical.

See also Obama wins! and Expert Prediction. Scorecard of predictions here (accuracy highly correlated with M, not V ;-)

Who is this guy?

Xu Cheng, Moodys’ Analytics: Obama 303, Romney 235 (Note that this prediction was made back in February) “This prediction is tied to the Moody’s Analytics current baseline forecast for U.S. growth, which assumes that most states will continue to recover at slow to moderate speeds.”

Obama wins!

At least, according to the quants who performed the mind boggling, incomprehensible, mysterious, nearly impossible task of averaging state poll numbers to estimate likely electoral vote totals.

Pundit and non-quant reactions evidence of Idiocracy. See earlier post Bounded Cognition.

Chronicle: ... While it may not seem likely, poll aggregation is a threat to the supremacy of the punditocracy. In the past week, you could sense that some high-profile media types were being made slightly uncomfortable by the bespectacled quants, with their confusing mathematical models and zippy computer programs. The New York Times columnist David Brooks said pollsters who offered projections were citizens of “sillyland.”

Maybe, but the recent track record in sillyland is awfully solid. In the 2008 presidential election, Silver correctly predicted 49 of 50 states. Wang was off by only one electoral vote. Meanwhile, as Silver writes in his book, numerous pundits confidently predicted a John McCain victory based on little more than intestinal twinges.

... Most journalists are ill equipped to interpret data, he says (and few journalists would disagree), so they view statistics with skepticism and occasionally, in the case of Brooks, disdain. “The data-driven people are going to win in the long run,” Jackman says.

He sees it as part of the rise of what’s being called Big Data—that is, using actual information to make decisions. As Jackman points out, Big Data is already changing sports and business, and it may be that pundits are the equivalents of the baseball scouts in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, caring more about the naturalness of a hitter’s swing than whether he gets on base.

“Why,” Jackman wonders, “should political commentary be exempt from this movement?”

... Last week the professional pundit and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough ranted that people like Silver, Wang, Linzer, and Jackman—who think the presidential race is “anything but a tossup”—should be kept away from their computers “because they’re jokes.” Silver responded by challenging Scarborough to bet $1,000 on Romney (in the form of a donation to the American Red Cross) if he was so sure. This led to hand-wringing about whether it was appropriate for someone affiliated with The New York Times to make crass public wagers.

But the bet seemed like an important symbolic moment. The poll aggregators have skin in the game. They’ve made statistical forecasts and published them, not just gut-feeling guesses on Sunday-morning talk shows. And, in Silver’s case, as a former professional poker player, he is willing to back it up with something tangible.

Alex Tabarrok, an economist and blogger for Marginal Revolution, applauded, calling such bets a “tax on bullshit.” ...

Shout out to Sam Wang, Caltech '86 :-)

MSU photos 6

A tour of some animal facilities.

My office.

MSU Technologies -- exterior and some startup space.

Magical Mystery MOOCs

I predicted in my earlier post Whither higher education? that the main beneficiaries of MOOCs would be people who are well above average in intelligence and/or drive to learn.

NYTimes: Year of the MOOC

... Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it. “Signing up for a class is a lightweight process,” says Dr. Ng. It might take just five minutes, assuming you spend two devising a stylish user name. Only 46,000 attempted the first assignment in Dr. Ng’s course on machine learning last fall. In the end, he says, 13,000 completed the class and earned a certificate — from him, not Stanford.

That’s still a lot of students. The shimmery hope is that free courses can bring the best education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers, and expand intellectual and personal networks. Three-quarters of those who took Dr. Patterson’s “Software as a Service” last winter on Coursera (it’s now on edX) were from outside the United States, though the opposite was true of a course on circuits and electronics piloted last spring by Dr. Agarwal. But both attracted highly educated students and both reported that over 70 percent had degrees (more than a third had graduate degrees). And in a vote of confidence in the form, students in both overwhelmingly endorsed the quality of the course: 63 percent who completed Dr. Agarwal’s course as well as a similar one on campus found the MOOC better; 36 percent found it comparable; 1 percent, worse.

Ray Schroeder, director of the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois, Springfield, says three things matter most in online learning: quality of material covered, engagement of the teacher and interaction among students. The first doesn’t seem to be an issue — most professors come from elite campuses, and so far most MOOCs are in technical subjects like computer science and math, with straightforward content. But providing instructor connection and feedback, including student interactions, is trickier. ...

From Whither higher education?

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).

"The bar is different ..."

The NYTimes on Asian-Americans and affirmative action. Asians rated only a couple of mentions in the Fisher v Texas oral arguments, and always by a conservative justice. I recommend the reader comments at the link (use the Reader Picks filter).

NYTimes: ... “If you look at the Ivy League, you will find that Asian-Americans never get to 20 percent of the class,” said Daniel Golden, author of “The Price of Admission” and editor at large for Bloomberg News. “The schools semiconsciously say to themselves, ‘We can’t have all Asians.’ ” Mr. Golden says it is helpful to think of Asians as the new Jews because some rules of college admissions, like geographic diversity, were originally aimed at preventing the number of Jews from growing too high.

Commenting on similar efforts involving Asian applicants, Rod Bugarin, a former admissions officer at Wesleyan, Brown and Columbia, said: “The bar is different for every group. Anyone who works in the industry knows that.” ...

More important, some argue, Asian-Americans themselves benefit from the campus diversity the system produces. Schools where admission is purely through a test, like the elite public New York City high school Stuyvesant, often have large percentages of Asian-Americans. The University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles are more than half Asian. That doesn’t help them integrate effectively, to pierce what some call the bamboo ceiling in the corporate and political worlds.

[ These same people argue that a "critical mass" on campus is a good thing for minority groups ... ]

From the reader comments:

Asian Americans aren't mentioned often in the debate about affirmative action in this newspaper because they're the best argument against the policy existing in its current state. This is a group that faced extreme racial discrimination throughout their history in the United States and even had legal legislation passed against them, but has excelled despite little formal assistance from the federal government. And to be frank, this destroys the notion many of my liberal counterparts hold that previously oppressed minorities simply cannot make it without the government holding their hand.

And make no mistake that Asians are discriminated against.

http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2009/10/07/do-elite-private-col...

"Espenshade found that when comparing applicants with similar grades, scores, athletic qualifications, and family history for seven elite private colleges and universities: Whites were three times as likely to get fat envelopes as Asians. Hispanics were twice as likely to win admission as whites. African-Americans were at least five times as likely to be accepted as whites." ...

##########

My mom didn't want me to marry an Asian girl because she feared her grandchildren would be discriminated against. Turned out she was absolutely right.

But unlike most of the kids applying to colleges from Stuyvesant HS, who are mostly Asians of one sort or another, my daughter has reluctantly and resentfully chosen to conceal her Asian identity in college application in the long-standing tradition of American strivers who are able to "pass."

For Stuy kids without that option, the combination of anti-Asian discrimination, inside-track admission policies for the children of celebrities and alumni and vast numbers of slots reserved for athletes, chances of admission to the elite universities become slim indeed, as admission numbers prove.

These kids, the best and brightest of New York City, have learned their lessons well, and know the game is rigged against them. ...

See also this earlier post: Asian hordes in NYTimes and WSJ.

Quants and campaigns

Big data, analytics, randomized experiments and modern political campaigns. "... the most advanced political marketers are ahead of commercial marketers." Turnout efforts targeted at voters whose preference is predictable are more efficient (in votes per dollar spent) than attempts at persuasion.

Sasha Issenberg shows how cutting-edge social science and analytics are reshaping the modern political campaign, upending the way political campaigns are run in the 21st century. In The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns Issenberg writes about the techniques—including persuasion experiments, innovative ways to mobilize voters, heavily researched electioneering methods—and shows how they’re being used.

MSU photos 5

Autumn in East Lansing (near Lyman Briggs residential college on the MSU campus).

Senator Levin visits an MSU lab. The device they are discussing detects DNA from invasive species using a microfluidic chip.

Visit to UW Madison as part of the UW-MSU Great Lakes BioEnergy Research Center collaboration. The first building is microbiology, the second one under construction is for the Wisconsin Energy Institute which will be home to the GLBRC.

At the UW-MSU game (view from Chancellor's box). MSU won in overtime! In the next box the MSU athletic director and coaches were screaming like maniacs when MSU scored the winning touchdown. The Wisconsin fans were friendly and polite :-)