"Aurora" doesn't sound very Chinese

McAfee dissects the exploit used against Google and other companies operating in China. Given the "social vector" used for initial penetration -- sending emails that appear to come from close associates -- there is an obvious motivation for these hackers to get access to gmail accounts. What's the evidence that this had anything to do with the Chinese government? The McAfee report is careful not to speculate.

If I were a Chinese hacker, wouldn't the filepaths on my development machine have non-English (unicode) characters? I'm sure some readers of this blog would know -- if you develop software in a Chinese language environment, do you use English words or Chinese characters for path and directory names?

Of course, it's possible the attackers just bought the malware from a black hat developer somewhere or have deliberately obfuscated the origin of their code. We need some more forensic information...

McAfee Security Insights Blog: ... the intruders gained access to an organization by sending a tailored attack to one or a few targeted individuals. We suspect these individuals were targeted because they likely had access to valuable intellectual property. These attacks will look like they come from a trusted source, leading the target to fall for the trap and clicking a link or file. That’s when the exploitation takes place, using the vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Once the malware is downloaded and installed, it opens a back door that allows the attacker to perform reconnaissance and gain complete control over the compromised system. The attacker can now identify high value targets and start to siphon off valuable data from the company. ...

Operation “Aurora”

I am sure you are wondering about the name “Aurora.” Based on our analysis, “Aurora” was part of the filepath on the attacker’s machine that was included in two of the malware binaries that we have confirmed are associated with the attack. That filepath is typically inserted by code compilers to indicate where debug symbols and source code are located on the machine of the developer. We believe the name was the internal name the attacker(s) gave to this operation. ...

Google dead in China?

WSJ reports on the decision process at Google. There are still a number of open questions:

1. What were Google's prospects in China? Are they really hopelessly behind Baidu? I've seen market share estimates ranging from 15-30% (no agreement even on the sign of the derivative!), and also the claim that the most sophisticated users (i.e., the ones with the most disposable income in the long run) tended to use Google. Perhaps no reason to throw in the towel -- but then why did Kai Fu Lee resign in September? Was it just the opportunity to run his own investment fund? (Here is an earlier post on Baidu, with a talk given by founder Robin Li.)

2. How serious is the state-sponsored security threat to companies operating in China? Did this play a big role in Google's decision? Coordinated attacks by state-run intelligence are significantly harder to deal with than ordinary hackers or even corporate espionage. An intelligence agency only has to turn a few key employees to get at important source code that necessarily would have to be available to researchers and operations people at Google China. It would be difficult to justify the risks of operating in an environment that hostile. (Needless to say, it would be long-run detrimental for China to create an environment that hostile to foreign companies.) On the other hand, snooping around for information about a few email users is hardly a threat of the same proportions.

WSJ: Google Inc.'s startling threat to withdraw from China was an intensely personal decision, drawing its celebrated founders and other top executives into a debate over the right way to confront the issues of censorship and cyber security.

The blog post Tuesday that revealed Google's very public response to what it called a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China" was crafted over a period of weeks, with heavy involvement from Google's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

For the two men, China has always been a sensitive topic. Mr. Brin has long confided in friends and Google colleagues of his ambivalence in doing business in China, noting that his early childhood in Russia exacerbated the moral dilemma of cooperating with government censorship, people who have spoken to him said. Over the years, Mr. Brin has served as Google's unofficial corporate conscience, the protector of its motto "Don't be Evil."

The investigation into the cyber intrusion began weeks ago, although how Google detected it remains unclear. As Google employees gathered more evidence they believed linked the attack to China and Chinese authorities, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, along with Messrs. Page and Brin, began discussing how they should respond, entering into an intense debate over whether it was better to stay in China and do what they can to change the regime from within, or whether to leave, according to people familiar with the discussions. A Google spokesman said Messrs. Page, Brin and Schmidt wouldn't comment.

Mr. Schmidt made the argument he long has, according to these people, namely that it is moral to do business in China in an effort to try to open up the regime. Mr. Brin strenuously argued the other side, namely that the company had done enough trying and that it could no longer justify censoring its search results.

How the debate ultimately resolved itself remains unclear. The three ultimately agreed they should disclose the attack publicly, trying to break with what they saw as a conspiratorial culture of companies keeping silent about attacks of this nature, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Soon, Google's vice president of public policy and communications, Rachel Whetstone, began crafting and revising a number of versions of a possible statement the company planned to release publicly, these people said, sharing it with the three.

The top three agreed that in addition to discussing the attack, the blog post should contain some language about human rights, the strongest statement of which is a clause in the penultimate paragraph of the post.

The section said they had reached the decision to re-evaluate their business in China after considering the attacks "combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web."

Concerned about potential retribution against Google employees in China, the founders and their advisors agreed to include a line saying that the move was "driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China."

... Veteran observers of trade between the countries suggest that Google, and the U.S. generally, has little leverage to press China to back down on Internet censorship or other issues.

Some expressions of support for Google's position flowed in from around the world, including from consumers in China as well as some U.S. companies—including rival Yahoo Inc.—and politicians. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Tuesday issued a statement saying Google's allegations "raise very serious concerns and questions," and that "we look to the Chinese government for an explanation."

Odds are high Google could be left largely on its own in taking concrete steps to confront the Chinese government. Veteran observers of trade between the countries suggest that Google, and the U.S. generally, has very little leverage to press China to back down on Internet censorship or other issues.

Besides the Google.cn Web site, Google has a range of other business initiatives and partnerships in China that could be affected by its decision. By snubbing Chinese authorities so publicly, the company risks government retaliation against itself or its partners. The decision also affects local competitors who could benefit from any retreat. Shares of Google's biggest Chinese rival, Baidu Inc., surged following the news.

Google's blog post Tuesday said cyber-attacks on its infrastructure resulted in "the theft of intellectual property," stating that it found evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.

Again, snooping on activists and stealing core IP are two very different activities. Which was more disturbing to Google? Previous discussion here.

“Don’t Be Evil” always did sound a bit to me like tikkun olam, or repairing the world (see this profile of Brin and Page). Not sure whether CEO Schmidt is down with that ;-)

What's up with Google and China?

Here is Google's official statement that caused all the commotion. (Note it appeared on a blog :-)

Some good comments at TechCrunch:

1. Google’s business was not doing well in China. Does anyone really think Google would be doing this if it had top market share in the country? For one thing, I’d guess that would open them up to shareholder lawsuits. Google is a for-profit, publicly-held company at the end of the day. When I met with Google’s former head of China Kai-fu Lee in Beijing last October, he noted that one reason he left Google was that it was clear the company was never going to substantially increase its market share or beat Baidu. Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn’t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.

2. Google is ready to burn bridges. This is not how negotiations are done in China, and Google has done well enough there to know that. You don’t get results by pressuring the government in a public, English-language blog post. If Google were indeed still working with the government this letter would not have been posted because it has likely slammed every door shut, as a long-time entrepreneur in China Marc van der Chijs and many others said on Twitter. This was a scorched earth move, aimed at buying Google some good will in the rest of the world; Chinese customers and staff were essentially just thrown under the bus.

Actually, recent reports estimate their 2009 search market share at around 30 percent, which is nothing to sneeze at. They could have had a good business in China, although I agree with Kai Fu Lee that the government would never let them dominate the market there the way they do in the rest of the world.

The hacking used trojans injected via a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe (PDF file attachments) [Edit: or was it an IE browser problem? And were the hackers really Chinese -- why codename Aurora?]. The claim that these attacks on multiple companies were coordinated by Chinese intelligence services is plausible but far from proven.

It's important to emphasize that the Chinese government is not monolithic. The parts of the government concerned with economic growth and technology development will be asking some hard questions of the intelligence apparatus about this. No economic planner wants high tech companies like Google or Adobe to stop operating in China as a consequence of security risks.

The killing of a physicist in Tehran

The top story on the Times web site today is about the assassination of a physicist at Tehran University.

A remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle killed an Iranian physics professor outside his home in northern Tehran on Tuesday, state media reported, blaming the United States and Israel for the attack.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. One state broadcaster, IRIB, quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying that “in the initial investigation, signs of the triangle of wickedness by the Zionist regime, America and their hired agents are visible in the terrorist act” against the scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi.

... The Web site of Iran’s state television declared the bombing a “terrorist act by counterrevolutionaries and elements of arrogance,” a reference to the United States. Security forces are investigating, The A.P. quoted the report as saying.

The United States and western allies have been pressing Iran to halt its nuclear enrichment program, which Tehran insists is solely for civilian purposes to produce electricity. But the West fears Iran is seeking to build a nuclear weapon that would threaten Israel and upset the regional power balance.

Last year, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, disappeared during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia; Iran accused the United States of helping to kidnap him.

After Tuesday’s explosion, the government’s supporters and opponents traded accusations and claims that the scientist had supported their camp.

Here is a picture of the victim. My condolences to his family and friends.

His recent publication list (below) does not suggest he was involved in the bomb program, although you never know what people do in their spare time. If I had to guess I would suppose he was killed for being pro-reform.

49. Non-Douglas-Kazakov phase transition of two-dimensional generalized Yang-Mills theories, Eur. Phys. Jour. C 51 (2007) 193 [pdf]

50. Asymptotic behavior of $\omega$ in general quintom model, Gen. Rel. Grav. 40 (2008) 107 [pdf]

51. Klein-Gordon and Dirac particles in non-constant scalar-curvature background, Int. Jour. Mod. Phys. A 23 (2008) 1613 [pdf]

52. Quantum induced w = -1 crossing of the quintessence and phantom models, JCAP 0901 (2009) 035 [pdf]

53. Remarks on generalized Gauss-Bonnet dark energy, Phys. Rev. D 79 (2009) 063006 [pdf]

More details at the blog post here. Coincidentally, I first learned quantum mechanics (during high school) from the Iowa State University Professor Hauptman mentioned at the link. He is a high energy experimentalist and his work has no near-term military applications.

When I was growing up my father, a professor, had graduate students from Iran. I remember attending a traditional Iranian wedding. One of the students pointed to another guest, saying to me, "Look, he is SAVAK" -- referring to the Shah's secret police.

Labor arbitrage

Some interesting numbers from this blog post by a software industry veteran operating in China. As a rule of thumb, it seemed to me that in non-tourist Beijing the buying power of a yuan (1 rmb) was very roughly equivalent to a dollar here: a cheap meal for 5-10 rmb, a supermarket beer for 1 rmb, etc. So, even at the 5 to 1 labor arbitrage rate suggested below a software developer in China has roughly similar buying power in local products as a developer here in the US (current exchange rate is 6-7 rmb per dollar). Of course, that buying power equivalence doesn't apply to "tradeables" like laptops, gasoline, automobiles, etc.

In the National Academies Press 2005 report, Rising Above The Gathering Storm, it was noted that "for the cost of one chemist or engineer in the U.S., a company can hire about five chemists in China or 11 engineers in India." In fact, I have personally observed that the labor arbitrage difference is the largest in an absolute sense the higher a firm opts to go on the value chain. For example, a Ph.D. who is paid $125 per hour in the States (whether fully-burdened or on contract) can be billed at about $25 per hour, whereas a $75 per hour Java programmer (an average Joe Java programmer, not a superstar) can be billed at between $16-18 per hour. And a superstar Java programmer: $100-125 per hour in the States, whereas a Tsinghua equivalent is billable by us at $20-23 per hour. As to the 11-to-1 ratio noted by the COSEPUP report, it's certainly doable (not always, but sometimes) in certain areas such as software testing where talent in Tier 2 cites can be tapped. Advice: Don't go to Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen for software testing or localization/globalization. And even though I personally don't like BJ, the best high-end talent is in BJ, not in SH, SZ, DL (Dalian), or anywhere else in the mainland.

The Chicago School and the financial crisis

New Yorker economics correspondent John Cassidy has a very balanced piece about the impact of the credit crisis on thinking at The Chicago School. He also uses the term apostasy to describe Posner's turn toward Keynes.

In the article, Heckman, Becker and Rajan seem the most reasonable. Fama is obviously clinging to his priors and Lucas refused to talk to Cassidy.

Cassidy makes additional remarks on his blog, and promises in the near future to publish more detailed notes on the interviews he did with the Chicago economists.

... For people interested in the subject, and there seems to be a lot of you, the good news is that I’m planning on posting here much fuller versions of the interviews I did in Chicago, with the likes of Gene Fama, Gary Becker, and Richard Posner, who recently converted to Keynesianism. It’s the nature of long-form magazine journalism that a lot of interesting stuff gets left out of the finished article, but, thanks to the Web, there’s no reason it shouldn’t appear in some form. Plus, I think it’s a good time to let the Chicago economists speak for themselves. Over the last couple of years, they have taken a battering at the hands of myself, Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, and others. Having just finished writing a book entitled “How Markets Fail,” I went to the Windy City eager to learn first hand how the critiques of Chicago economics were being received. Some of what I was told, I don’t agree with, but at this time of intellectual tumult I think it makes fascinating reading.

In the article Posner notes that few economists knew anything about how real financial markets work. This is certainly true in my experience. In particular, they were naive about individual incentives within the system (see Greenspan comments), and very few academics (with perhaps one or two exceptions; video) had any idea what a CDO or CDS was before 2008. I can't resist a little sniping here. If you want to ask someone about electrons, or how to build a quantum logic gate, or how to fabricate nanostructures, you can't do much better than to head to your local research university and talk to a physics professor. Strangely, if I wanted to learn something about credit markets or securitization or the risk from speculative bubbles, I would have been better off talking to a former physicist on Wall St. than to almost any professor in an economics department or business school. I'm not exaggerating -- I've done both many times. Posner also says:

"Well, one possibility is that they [the economists] have learned nothing [from the financial crisis] ... Because -- how should I put it -- because market correctives work very slowly in dealing with academic markets. Professors have tenure. ... It takes a great deal to drive them out of their accustomed way of doing business."

For more, see my talk on the financial crisis.

Wikipedia: emergent phenomenon?

Is Wikipedia a magical aggregator and filter of expertise from millions of different contributors? Or is it more like traditional encyclopedia projects, with a thousand or so core Wikipedians doing most of the work? The distribution of edits (a typical power law) supports the latter interpretation, but a detailed analysis of particular articles shows that important knowledge is injected by individuals who are not part of the core group.

Aaron Swartz: I first met Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia, when he came to speak at Stanford. Wales told us about Wikipedia’s history, technology, and culture, but one thing he said stands out. “The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia,” he noted, “is that it’s some emergent phenomenon — the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing — thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and out of this emerges a coherent body of work.”† But, he insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” where “I know all of them and they all know each other”. Really, “it’s much like any traditional organization.”

The difference, of course, is crucial. Not just for the public, who wants to know how a grand thing like Wikipedia actually gets written, but also for Wales, who wants to know how to run the site. “For me this is really important, because I spend a lot of time listening to those four or five hundred and if … those people were just a bunch of people talking … maybe I can just safely ignore them when setting policy” and instead worry about “the million people writing a sentence each”.

So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.” ...

[But what if we analyze the amount of text contributed by each person, not just the number of edits? See original for analysis of edit patterns of specific articles, including amount of text added.]

... When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

Mixergy interview

I did this interview with Andrew Warner, an entrepreneur whose web site mixergy.com aims to help other business innovators. Andrew and I both ran tech startups "back in the day" and got to experience the Internet Bubble first hand :-)

Personnel selection

I'm currently chairing a faculty search, and I got into a conversation with a colleague on the topic of what psychologists would call personnel selection. I've seen studies which show that people are typically very overconfident in their judgements of candidates based on informal interviews or initial impressions, and that the structured and quantitative measure-based selection method used by firms like Google tends to be the most effective. Most professors, of course, don't want to hear this -- they seem quite confident in their own heuristics :-)

I'm open to the possibility that the traditional process is still the best way to select a colleague. But has anyone studied this question? Is anyone familiar with the personnel selection literature as applied to high-end positions like scientists, professors and researchers?

Here's a highly cited article that a quick search turned up. GMA = "General Mental Ability" :-)

The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings

Full paper

This article summarizes the practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research in personnel selection. On the basis of meta-analytic findings, this article presents the validity of 19 selection procedures for predicting job performance and training performance and the validity of paired combinations of general mental ability (GMA) and Ihe 18 other selection procedures. Overall, the 3 combinations with the highest multivariate validity and utility for job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (mean validity of .63), GMA plus an integrity test (mean validity of .65), and GMA plus a structured interview (mean validity of .63). A further advantage of the latter 2 combinations is that they can be used for both entry level selection and selection of experienced employees. The practical utility implications of these summary findings are substantial. The implications of these research findings for the development of theories of job performance are discussed.


... As noted above, GMA is also an excellent predictor of job-related learning. It has been found to have high and essentially equal predictive validity for performance (amount learned) in job training programs for jobs at all job levels studied. In the U.S. Department of Labor research, the average predictive validity performance in job training programs was .56 (Hunter & Hunter, 1984, Table 2); this is the figure entered in Table 2. Thus, when an employer uses GMA to select employees who will have a high level of performance on the job, that employer is also selecting those who will learn the most from job training programs and will acquire job knowledge faster from experience ... Because of its special status, GMA can be considered the primary personnel measure for hiring decisions, and one can consider the remaining 18 personnel measures as supplements to GMA measures.

Tsinghua uber alles

Dad's alma mater seems to be doing well!

Science 11 July 2008: A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor in the Chinese capital, ranks second. Between 2004 and 2006, those two schools overtook the University of California, Berkeley, as the most fertile training ground for U.S. Ph.D.s (see graph). South Korea's Seoul National University occupies fourth place behind Berkeley, followed by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

But, see Brain drain slowdown. (Also: IIT uber alles? :-)



Of course, the schools listed above all have large enrollments. If you normalize by undergraduate population the top school is Caltech. (Almost 40 percent of Caltech undergrads go on to earn a doctorate.)





I was at Tsinghua in December. Surprisingly, they don't heat the buildings in winter -- even the school of management had freezing cold hallways (individual offices and classrooms are heated). It seems brutal, but it's very green! Apparently 40 percent of the US energy budget goes to heating and cooling buildings. Just look at your winter heating bill and you can understand why central heating is a luxury in developing countries (energy is a tradeable).

Adjustable spectacles

What a cool idea! Adjustable spectacles for about 4 Euros -- a potential benefit to hundreds of millions of poor people around the world with vision problems. See this Times article for more.

One design is based on the Alvarez Lens, invented by Berkeley physicist Luis Alvarez (an amazingly creative guy!). See here for other adjustable lens mechanisms.

I need to stockpile some of these just in case society collapses...

I'm at an age when an increasing number of my former classmates and colleagues, after being trained in science and earning their fortunes in finance or technology startups, are starting to retire! If you're looking for a way to give back to society, why not work on or contribute to a project like this one?

U-spec: Whereas normal spectacles contain fixed, single lenses, the U-Spec lenses are formed from two complementary parts mounted together. The complexly curved surface of these parts resembles a saddle, with a hollow to one side and a little "hill" to the other. These two parts can fit together with the hill of one sitting in the hollow of the other, but they can also slide apart in opposite directions. The key thing is that in any configuration they together form a viable lens for assisting defective eyesight, with the power of the lens changing depending on their position.

It may sound complicated, but for the wearer of the U-Spec adjusting the lenses couldn't be easier. You simply close one eye at a time and find the correct focus for the other by sliding a small knob up and down in a vertical slot in the frame, next to the lens in question.

DIY optometry
"People wearing these spectacles can look at a far away object and move the knob until they have it sharp," says Dr van der Heijde. "You don't need a specialist to get good spectacles, you can do it yourself — and that's a good opportunity to have in Third World countries."

U-specs.org: The principle of the universal spectacles is based on the discovery of Alvarez, an American who, in 1968, won the Nobel Prize in the field of high-energy Physics. The lens is composed of two moveable parts with a flat surface facing each other and “saddle form“ outer surfaces (see fig. 1). Alvarez mathematically demonstrated in 1964 that the refractive power of the combined lenses vary proportionally with the amount of relative movement of the lens parts.

Happy New Year!

Eugene from our bedroom deck. In the larger version (click) you can see the UO football stadium across the river from us, about 3 miles away. The Ducks play Ohio State in the Rose Bowl later today.

When I came to Oregon from Yale a decade ago, I also had an offer from Wisconsin. But a visit in April to Madison (gray, snow, yuck) was enough to convince me to follow my instincts and head further west.



This is my son's first attempt at fixed-wing aircraft design :-) He built it all by himself -- I was a little surprised when he showed it to me!



Not to be outdone, my daughter provided this self-portrait:

Are too many students going to college?

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article asking Are too many students going to college? Having recently taught some large lecture classes in physics for non-scientists, I am quite interested in this question. For related discussion, see Higher education and human capital.

Here are some answers provided by Charles Murray, our favorite education curmudgeon, to the questions asked in the article.

Who should and shouldn't go to college?

Charles Murray: It has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation's youth possess. That doesn't mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.

[Gee... how would you empirically demonstrate this? You'd have to have some method for actually "measuring" cognitive ability. But surely that's not possible -- only in science fiction! Why, the things you could accomplish if that were possible...]


Economists have cited the economic benefits that individual students derive from college. Does that still apply?

Murray: A large wage premium for having a bachelor's degree still exists. For everything except degrees in engineering and the hard sciences, I submit that most of that premium is associated with the role of the B.A. as a job requirement instead of anything that students with B.A.'s actually learn. The solution to that injustice—and it is one of the most problematic social injustices in contemporary America—is to give students a way to show employers what they know, not where they learned it and how long it took them. In other words, substitute certifications for the bachelor's degree.


Who should pay for students to attend college?

Murray: Ideally, students themselves. If that means delaying college for a few years to save money, so much the better—every college professor has seen the difference in maturity and focus between kids straight out of high school and those who have worked or gone into the military for a few years. The ideal is unattainable. But somehow we've got to undermine the current system whereby upper-middle-class children go to college without having to invest in it.

I particularly like the comment below from an insightful (see, especially, his comments on calculus) UT Austin student (Plan II?).

Too many are attending and I agree full-heartedly with Mr. Murray that only 10% of college-aged individuals should be attending University.

I saw firsthand the results of this phenomenon deeply entrenched in the lecture halls of my particular University and was perplexed at the levels of incompetence and lack of passion towards subject material shown by many of my fellow students. I wondered if anyone else shared my particular insights and was relieved to find Mr. Murray and his supporters waiting for me with open arms, telling me, "you are not alone".

I don't doubt the value of a hard science or engineering education, the students who remain in those fields are for the most part, fairly smart, and whose work and learning will benefit our society. (Though there are too many unqualified individuals who think being a doctor is a cool and easy job where you make a lot of money with little work) Those students are quickly weeded out, as should be.

But in the less challenging fields such as most of the liberal arts, business, communications, I found the lack of intellectual spirit in my fellow students disturbing. The most common responses I encountered when asking about their choice of major and their reason for being at this particular school, their responses were as follows. Degree=Good Job. Football! (a valid point, as our team is the underdog this year in the BCS Championship game). Party=Drunk=Its COLLEGE!. Not one intellectually stimulated response about the faculty and resources offered by one of the top research universities in the nation. They had no passion for their subjects, they waltzed into class with glazed eyes, and danced out with a degree. Most have never checked out a book from the library. Spark-notes are their best friend.

I was stifled by the inadequate writing ability of many of my peers when I reviewed and edited their papers. Some of them could not even write at a middle school level, much less a college level. At a top 50 University, nonetheless. I can't even begin imagine how it is at lesser schools.

An unfortunate trend at my University is that a great majority of students will choose their classes simply based on the "logic" of pick-a-prof and grade distributions. The most popular ones are the ones that give lots of A's. Few are actually interested in the topic of choice, and the unlucky ones get dropped into hard classes they don't want, skulking, sleeping, or skipping class entirely stifling the learning environment of people who are actually there to learn. Its also sad for Professors as well, because the truly excellent ones are browbeaten and criticized for their inability to gift A's onto undeserving students.

Grade inflation is through the roof here. I went to a challenging prep school where my best writings and most carefully thought out essays would usually only earn me high B's, with the occasional A. I thought University would be a challenge, but to my dismay, it has been anything but. I realized it when I quickly spat out some honestly dreadful essays for Philosophy and English Literature because I was in a rush, only to be rewarded with a sparkling 100 and rave comments. Really? Easy A's. Though according to most of my fellow students, these classes were incredibly difficult, the TA and professor were unfair graders, gave out too much reading, etc. Horrifying.

In Mathematics and Quantitative sciences it is the same story, though even our "honors students" seem ill prepared to handle the rigors of college level mathematics. Calculus is dumbed down so that the regular student can succeed. But even then, its still widely failed class even in its simplified state But that bodes ill, many people can "do" calculus, but few can understand its implications and applications. I can "do calculus" in the terms that I can memorize the concepts, complete practice problems, and repeat the ordeal on the test. But I can only apply its implications to the simplest of physical and economic problems. I'm not good enough to really UNDERSTAND calculus. I know that. But my ability to "do" calculus earns me an A+ at this University. And it really should not.

Too many kids are at college wasting their time. They are not happy with their studies, not happy with the debt they are piling on their heads to attend, but happy with the football team, and the plans for the weekend. They are here for the wrong reasons.

In physics 101 last quarter I gave A's or B's to almost 60 percent of the class, which I regarded as very lenient grading. (I guess if this were Brown or Stanford I could have given all A's with just a few punitive B's for the laggards at the bottom ;-) But nevertheless I had to field dozens of emails from aggrieved students complaining about their "low" grades! It makes me wonder whether everyone else (i.e., other professors, high school teachers, etc.) is engaged in grade inflation? It's certainly the easy way out -- I'm sure you get higher student evaluations if you tip off during the term that you're an easy grader. Who is holding the line?

The view from Clarium

Some interesting graphs from Clarium's August 2009 commentary. Clarium is the hedge fund run by Peter Thiel, of PayPal fame. (Click for larger images.)

Americans paying more to live longer. Per capita annual health care costs in 1960 were $1000 (real dollars) and life expectancy 70 years. Today per capita annual health care costs are $7000 and life expectancy 79 years. Many (most?) Americans are rich enough to willingly pay an extra $6000 each year (a total of over $400k!) for an additional decade of life expectancy, but it's not exactly an impressive result for 50 years of health care innovation.



The real cost of primary + secondary education has risen 3x in the last 30 years, but has this resulted in improved human capital? Not if judged by average (real) wages. (Or, perhaps the fruits of productivity gains have been stolen by the rich? The top 1% of wage earners have done extremely well over the same period :-)



Who is shaping the future? Global venture capital investment is dominated by the US, with China almost equal to Europe ex-UK. Israel is tied with the UK and leads on a per-capita basis.

Worst case scenarios and governance in China

While in China I asked a number of people the following question:

What is the worst case scenario for China in the next 10-20 years which has at least a 10 percent likelihood?

The respondents included professors, engineers and government officials. Interestingly, no one I asked mentioned social or environmental or economic collapse, or even conflict over Taiwan. More than one person did mention the possibility of trade conflict leading to runaway nationalistic response. But if that's the worst case scenario, I consider the future pretty bright.

One particularly insightful analysis from a Harvard-trained Tsinghua professor described the present Chinese system of governance as favoring stability and slow change. He noted that leaders, both at his university and within the central party, are elected by vote in a process involving numerous stakeholders. (The mechanics of this voting process, while apparently strict and rule-based, is kept secret from the general public. Exactly how this system evolved into being over the last 30 years was unknown even to our analyst, but it's easy to imagine that a system favoring stability would have been favored by people who clearly remember Mao and the cultural revolution.) The stakeholders represent a broad spectrum of interests, including those of retired former officials and, in the case of his university, prominent former professors and administrators. To avoid a veto from any particular interest group, leaders tend to favor consensus and to eschew extreme positions. Significant change can only occur after consensus emerges among a substantial majority of stakeholders.

An example of an emergent policy shift is the recent government emphasis on reducing inequality and helping the rural population: apparently there is now a broad consensus that things have gone too far. Just a few years ago news stories often noted that modest school fees prevented peasant children from completing their education. On this trip, I was told that such fees have, at least theoretically, been waived. (Someone who knows the real situation should please let me know, but at least that is what I was told while in China.)

A consensus-driven system will tend to allow rather obvious problems to get out of hand, at least for while. If addressing the problem requires a significant policy shift, then action has to wait until essentially everyone agrees on both the problem and the solution! It's plausible to me that this governance model is consistent with recent Chinese actions (or inaction) related to the urban-rural divide, pollution and the environment, and (gulp!) dollar reserve accumulation. Nothing happens for a long time, but then, suddenly, policies can shift radically. This sounds unwieldy, though grappling with obvious but difficult problems isn't exactly something that our own system has been good at recently -- see, for example, fiscal deficits, health care, financial regulation, income inequality, energy policy, etc., etc.

For related discussion, see Is there a China model?

Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men 2009

Linus said it best in A Charlie Brown Christmas (Luke 2.14):

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Merry Christmas!

Classical and Quantum Gravity 2009

The most read articles of 2009 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity -- see under JULY :-)

JANUARY
What is a particle?
D Colosi and C Rovelli
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/2/025002

FEBRUARY
Arithmetical chaos and quantum cosmology
L A Forte
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/4/045001

MARCH
Local Hawking temperature for dynamical black holes
S A Hayward, R Di Criscienzo, M Nadalini, L Vanzo and S Zerbini
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/6/062001

APRIL
The double pulsar system: a unique laboratory for gravity
M Kramer and N Wex
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/7/073001

MAY
LISA Pathfinder: the experiment and the route to LISA
M Armano et al.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/9/094001

JUNE
Status of NINJA: the Numerical INJection Analysis project
L Cadonati et al.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/11/114008

JULY
What is the entropy of the universe?
P H Frampton, S D H Hsu, T W Kephart and D Reeb
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/14/145005

AUGUST
Testing gravitational-wave searches with numerical relativity waveforms: results from the first Numerical INJection Analysis (NINJA) project
B Aylott et al.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/16/165008

SEPTEMBER
Polarized spots in anisotropic open universes
R Sung and P Coles
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/17/172001

OCTOBER
Present status of the Penrose inequality
M Mars
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/19/193001

NOVEMBER
The information paradox: a pedagogical introduction
S D Mathur
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/22/224001

DECEMBER
Casimir energy and gravitomagnetism
F Sorge
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/23/235002

What is the entropy of the universe?

P H Frampton, S D H Hsu, T W Kephart and D Reeb

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/14/145005

Abstract. Standard calculations suggest that the entropy of our universe is dominated by black holes, whose entropy is of order their area in Planck units, although they comprise only a tiny fraction of its total energy. Statistical entropy is the logarithm of the number of microstates consistent with the observed macroscopic properties of a system, hence a measure of uncertainty about its precise state. Therefore, assuming unitarity in black hole evaporation, the standard results suggest that the largest uncertainty in the future quantum state of the universe is due to the Hawking radiation from evaporating black holes. However, the entropy of the matter precursors to astrophysical black holes is enormously less than that given by area entropy. If unitarity relates the future radiation states to the black hole precursor states, then the standard results are highly misleading, at least for an observer that can differentiate the individual states of the Hawking radiation.

China photos

Sorry for the lack of posts -- I just returned from China, where blogging had to contend with the Great Firewall and a busy schedule. Below are some pictures from the trip -- click for larger versions.

Our "expedition" was led by a world famous Harvard mathematician, and included professors of economics, statistics, computer science and physics. The opportunity: to create a social science institute to observe and model the Chinese economy in real time using massive electronic data sets.

Hyatt Regency in Hangzhou:



Alibaba Group Headquarters in Hangzhou. I'm under NDA so I can't say too much, but the Alibaba Group is an impressive set of companies. The transaction volume on their Taobao (EBay-like) C2C site is estimated at around 2 percent of all retail sales in China this year, and should reach 5 percent within a few years. There are roughly 150 million users and 400 million items listed! All of the university students we met were Taobao users and many said it was their preferred method of shopping.



[I had some other photos of Alibaba headquarters here originally, but I guess I violated some corporate policies and they asked me to take them down! Below are some official photos of their building.]






Beijing: Wenjin Hotel in Tsinghua University Science Park -- next to Google China and Microsoft Research. If you squint you can see the Google logo in the picture below.

It was cold and windy in Beijing, but as a consequence we had sunny days with little noticeable air pollution. (See here for an air quality Twitter feed from the US embassy in Beijing. We did indeed have good air during our visit.) Traffic is, however, horrendous!










Our hotel was in Zhongguancun, the Silicon Valley of China, which includes the top two universities: Beijing University (Beida) and Tsinghua University. The leader of our expedition presided over the opening ceremony of the Tsinghua Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The hotel was crawling with world class mathematicians!

Below is a picture taken in the immense consumer electronics market in Zhongguancun, about a 20 minute walk from our hotel. Enter any of the buildings in this area and you'll be confronted with an army of salespeople trying to sell you laptops, cellphones, etc.



Ministry of Commerce. This meeting took place in a less affluent region of south Beijing where locals still burn coal for heat. For this reason, and because the region is in a slight valley, they tend to have a few bad air days a week, including the day of our visit. I could smell a distinct sulfurous odor in the air, and my eyes stung. The air quality provided a jarring contrast to the opulent surroundings at the ministry.




During a night off from lavish banquets and dinners in private dining rooms, I managed to meet with blogger maoxian, an expat Beijinger with a lot of insight about life and business in China.

The Scientific Life: entrepreneurs

From The Scientific Life, by Harvard historian of science Steven Shapin. This book is full of realistic descriptions of the "late modern" scientific enterprise, and how it came to be. (Publisher synopsis, interview, talk.)

Many scientific entrepreneurs reject any notion that the transformation of knowledge into material products or marketable services is any less intellectually demanding, or that it requires any lesser degree of intelligence, than so called pure science. ... The problems may be diffusely framed -- how to raise finance, recruit and motivate people, organize the corporate environment, locate markets and identify competitors -- but, because of that, they can plausibly be seen as more intellectually demanding than the well-framed problems of academic science. Entrepreneurs may see themselves as having a broad vision of the world, contrasted to the narrowness and inwardness of their purely academic colleagues. They know how to do things about which their colleagues are clueless. It's a matter of experience, of course, but it may also be seen as a form of constitutional intelligence.

While I can't help but like this paragraph, I do think we should distinguish between intellectual ability and other sorts of abilities. Scientists who start and run companies may have a broader set of skills (leadership, negotiation, risk taking, communication, psychological insight, etc.) than the typical academic, but I wouldn't describe running a startup as more intellectually demanding than pure scientific research (at least not theoretical physics!).

Open sesame!

Can anyone identify this corporate headquarters? Hint: it belongs to one of the largest tech companies in China. I'll be there for a meeting next week. (Click for larger version.)

I'm actually not sure how much I'm allowed to say about the meeting -- it will bring together professors from fields like math, computer science and economics to look at some big, big data sets :-)

Red Dawn 2010

This time the invaders are Chinese! In the 1984 original, starring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, the US and China were allies and the invaders were Soviet and Cuban troops. ("Wolverines!")

More here, including Chinese reactions. Is this trailer for real? (Looks a bit low budget.)


Obama in Beijing (SNL):

The intestinal fortitude of Freeman Dyson

The evening began ominously. Dyson had a stomach bug -- he declined to eat anything at dinner, and made several emergency trips to the bathroom. After dinner he fell asleep on a couch in the physics building. Facing a packed auditorium, with people sitting in the aisles and filling an adjoining overflow room with video monitor, the other organizers and I decided that we'd offer Freeman the chance to call the whole thing off when we woke him up. Luckily for everyone, he felt much better after the nap, and was obviously energized by the large and enthusiastic crowd. After we finished the Q&A, he turned to me and said "Well, your questions cured my bug!"

The questions we asked are listed below. You'll have to wait to watch the video in order to hear the answers!

[Video. Transcript.]

CAMBRIDGE

You write that scientists come in two varieties: hedgehogs and foxes. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Which kind of scientist makes the most important discoveries?

Of course, molecular biology was being born at that moment. But you advised Francis Crick, while he was still a physicist, that moving into biology might be premature. He didn’t take your advice did he, and a few years later he helped discern the structure of DNA? Mistake on your part?


MOVE TO AMERICA

You wrote that since childhood, some part of you had always known that the “Americans held the future in their hands and that the smart thing for me to do would be to join them.” Was that why you made your home in America? Do Americans still hold the future in their hands.

In the 50s, many people were fascinated with the potential of nuclear energy. Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, then Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, when he said: "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy electrical energy in their homes too cheap to meter." Did you share this excitement?

There were plans to build a nuclear airplane that would fly for a year at a time and you got involved with a nuclear rocket project-- the Orion Project. Tell us about that.

Weren’t you involved in the project’s demise—the test ban treaty?


THE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS

Now about the nature of science. You write, “Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tool rather than from new doctrines.” Could you elaborate?

Physics leads to some pretty weird places. You were at Princeton when Everett proposed his "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Could you describe the reaction to his ideas then (including your own), and your present opinion?

It’s been said that Quantum Electrodynamics or QED is the most successful theory science has ever produced, having been verified in some cases to an accuracy of 12 decimal places. It was worked out by two geniuses, Feynman and Schwinger, but their theories looked totally at odds—one used diagrams the other formal analysis. In perhaps your most celebrated piece of physics, you showed they were equivalent. I’m curious, did Feynman and Schwinger grasp immediately what you had done?

You write, “Heretics who question the dogmas are needed... I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies.” Do we need more heretics today?


WILD IDEAS

From science fact to science fiction. Your speculations about the future of humanity include the Dyson tree and the Dyson sphere. A Dyson tree is a genetically engineered plant capable of growing on a comet. You think comets are promising places for life..how so?

You've proposed that genetic engineering might be used for many purposes, from green energy to adapting humans for life in space…even to people growing their own dogs. Please tell us more.

What about engineering ourselves for greater intelligence; could that be the next leap forward in human evolution?


SCIENCE AND CULTURE

Jacques Hadamard said “It is important for him who wants to discover not to confine himself to one chapter of science, but to keep in touch with various others. ” Have scientists and mathematicians seized or squandered opportunities to learn from others in different disciplines?

To what extent should the public's view influence the path of science?

As a great observer of science, you’ve seen how science can evoke excessive hype and fear….has the negative public reaction to things like nuclear energy, GMOs, nanotechnology…has this surprised you?


SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Science and religion. There are scientists, like NIH chief Francis Collins, who believe in God and think religion is compatible with science. There are scientists, who are what you call passionate atheists—Hardy, Erdos, Dawkins, who think religion is a massive irrational distraction. You say that religion must be explored from the inside and those atheists, even very smart philosophers like Dan Dennett, will never understand it. How so?


In 2000, you were awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. You wrote, "I am neither a saint nor a theologian. To me, good works are more important than theology." What did you mean?


WRAP UP

We’ve spoken about science and religion, let’s end talking about technology. You write, “Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life, it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.” In your lifetime, those gifts include biotechnology, computers, and the Internet. What gifts might lie in our future?

What would you be working on today if you were 25 years old?

I will report the answers to some of my dinner questions. About Dirac and the path integral, Dyson thought that Feynman's story was probably true -- Dirac did not know that the quantum amplitude and the exponential of the action were more than "analogous" (indeed, they are proportional) until after Feynman had worked it out. It was also Feynman who had the idea of the sum over classical paths. In Dirac's paper the exponential of the action might have been a quantum operator, like the time evolution operator, which is the exponential of the Hamiltonian.

In Dirac's paper he writes that the quantum amplitude and e^{iS} are "analogous". Later Feynman asked him directly about it (according to Feynman):

F: Did you know they are proportional?

D: Are they?

F: Yes.

D: Oh, that's interesting.

I also asked about the infamous night with Feynman in the hotel in Oklahoma, and Dyson confirmed the accuracy of Feynman's recollection :-)

Climategate and the American Physical Society

I got this email message today. Again, I haven't done my homework on this issue, so I don't have a strong opinion. But the signatories to this email and (I suspect) a fair number of APS members do.

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled "The Climate Science isn't Settled," for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@pr****ton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Climategate at Tierneylab

Be sure to look at the hundreds of comments!

Tierneylab: ... I’m not trying to suggest that climate change isn’t a real threat, or that scientists are deliberately hyping it. But when they look at evidence of the threat, they may be subject to the confirmation bias — seeing trends that accord with their preconceptions and desires. Given the huge stakes in this debate — the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions — it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?

People keep asking me about climate change, and I tell them I just don't have enough time to do the homework necessary to justify my having a strong opinion on the issue. Note, by simply making that statement I am being politically incorrect -- I think I am supposed to accept that the "experts" know what they are doing. (Just as the bond rating agencies and financiers knew what they were doing a few years ago :-)

Very few of the people with strong opinions on climate change have done the homework I refer to -- read the literature (including arguments on both sides), look at the data, etc. In the case of the housing and credit bubble I did do the homework and as a result I thought we were in a bubble back in 2004, that credit derivatives were dangerous, and that it might end badly.

I can say something with very high confidence: scientists are not immune to groupthink!


[A reader asks: what if you don't have the technical background to actually "do your homework" -- i.e., read the scientific literature? (Perhaps because your liberal arts education left you unable to use important tools necessary for understanding how the world works ;-) In that case, you are limited to an examination of the process by which the science is done -- are the incentives right? Could researchers be victims of groupthink? Can critics be heard, and do they have access to resources (such as the original data)? This is a sociological question -- is science working properly in this particular subfield? A final factor that should influence your confidence level is that the track record of experts studying complex systems is quite poor. ]

An evening with Freeman Dyson

This is turning into a bit of a production -- 4 HD cameras and professional editing will hopefully result in a nice documentary video. Click for larger version of poster.

See Questions for Dyson.