Links

• Avery Thompson in Popular Mechanics: 5 Simple Math Problems No One Can Solve. "Easy to understand, supremely difficult to prove."
• Jordana Cepelewicz in Nautilus: The Social Physics of Trump Tactics. [Published a couple of weeks before the US elections, its title could very well have been "Phase Diagram of Bad Ideas"].
• Joanna Rothkopf in Jezebel: Here's What Happens to Your Body When You Die [video; 10 minutes].

A Wonderful Educational Module

Vi Hart and Nicki Case have created a web page with very instructive browser-based and visually attractive simulations: Parable of the Polygons: A Playable Post on the Shape of Society. It's also a practical and playful introduction to the 1971 classic, Dynamic Models of Segregation, by Thomas Schelling; the model itself is an interesting variation of the Ising model.

* * *

Hat tip to: Joshua Gans at Digitopoly.

Links

Following the #shirtstorm (and the apology), there has been an outpouring of articles and blog posts on the women-unfriendly culture in academic science in particular, and academia and science in general. Here are a few links:

1. Janet Stemwedel at Doing Good Science: The Rosetta mission #shirtstorm was never just about that shirt and A guide for science guys trying to understand the fuss about that shirt.

2. Kelly Baker in Vitae: Science Isn’t the Problem; Scientists Are.

3. Noah Smith in BloombergView: Economics Is a Dismal Science for Women. Money quote: "Why is it that the sciences look like a feminist nirvana compared with the economics profession, which seems to have a built-in bias that prevents women from advancing?"

Susan Watts: Society needs more than wonder to respect science

A very good column in Nature:

There is a fundamental difference between science communication and science journalism. At the science communication end of the spectrum sit the stories that show people how exciting science can be, the discovery of a wonder material, perhaps, or a new subatomic particle. Explaining the significance of sightings of the Higgs boson or of gravitational waves from the early Universe takes real skill.

Science journalism's job is to tell the stories that explore the murky underbelly of science, like the selling of bogus stem-cell cures to vulnerable patients. It is science journalism that will expose the rushed policy-making, the undisclosed profiteering, the conflicts of interest and the vested interests, the bad experiments, or the out-and-out frauds.

For both, you need to be the kind of person who asks “why” a lot. You need to enjoy coaxing sometimes shy, or reluctant, or just plain difficult scientists to tell you about their work — and then to feel enthused enough to want to tell somebody else.

But a journalist also needs to be persistent, and brave enough to find out the things that people don't want the world to know, and who often work hard to stop the world knowing — and to tell those tales too.

Links

1. ChemBark: A Disturbing Note in a Recent SI File ["SI" stands for supporting information for a research paper available at the journal's website]. The disturbing note is this:

   Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis ...

   A part of the discussion is about the meaning of the phrase "just make up".

2. Charlie Stross: Snowden leaks: the real take-home.

3. Jag Bhalla: Is Economics More Like History Than Physics?

4. Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed: Change at NYU: "New York University trustees sent out an e-mail Wednesday that officially said that John Sexton's presidency would end by 2016..." Much of Sexton's current troubles are specific to NYU's governance.

   Sexton is also known for his bold experiments in opening NYU campuses abroad -- Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. These experiments in globalization of higher ed are worth following; it will be interesting to see if (and in what form) they survive his departure.

Links

1. Atul Gawande: Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t?

2. Rex at Savage Minds: How to explain anthropology to a physicist.

   Anthropology is the science which studies human behavioral diversity. Because culturally-influenced conduct can take radically different forms in different places, it is foolhardy to use intuitions developed in one culture as a source of hypotheses about another. For this reason, it is reckless practice for natural scientists to stray into the expert territory of our discipline simply because they believe that if they are good at testing hypotheses in one realm they must be good at it in another.

   A good analogy to using the intuitions of one culture to to generate hypotheses about another culture would be to imagine a non-physicist with pre-theoretical intuitions about motion creating hypotheses about life aboard the international space station. Expectations about momentum, weight, and the behavior of fluids will founder in a micro-gravity environment. Because they have not had experience in microgravity, their intuitions will be incorrect.

   Simply because you are very good at shark embryology does not mean that you are ready to speak authoritatively about human societies. And, I am sure you will agree, vice versa.

   Often times specialized language in the life sciences is considered as a sign that those fields are mature and specialized, while specialized language in the human sciences is merely obfuscation or meaningless jargon. There seems to be an assumption that because biologists engage in marriage, commensality, and linguistic interaction they should, in principle, be able to understand all technical writing about these subjects. And yet somehow biologists think it obvious that layman cannot understand the the technical terminology of biochemistry, despite the fact that all laymen have metabolisms.

3. James Surowiecki: E-Book vs. P-Book. Largely about Barnes & Noble's iffy fortunes (and about its dumping its Nook tablet business), the article ends with the following on the continuing relevance of physical books:

   For many people, as a number of studies show, reading is a genuinely tactile experience—how a book feels and looks has a material impact on how we feel about reading. This isn’t necessarily Luddism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology—easy to read, portable, durable, and inexpensive. Unlike the phase-change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-books is going to be slow; coexistence is more likely than conquest. The book isn’t obsolete. Barnes & Noble just needs to make sure it isn’t, either.

Links: Bad Science Edition

1. Gary Stix: New Study: Neuroscience Research Gets an F for Reliability.

2. In 2010, Reinhart and Rogoff published a paper that, by many accounts, turned out to be influential in framing economic policy options back then. After looking at the dataset, economists at the University of Massachusetts have poked multiple holes in R&R's methodology, including an error in their Excel spreadsheet program. Start with Andrew Gelman's advice to R&R: "it’s best to admit your errors and go on from there," and look at the links for the backstory.

   This episode has triggered a flurry of posts on similar disasters in economics literature: Catherine Rampell has a post on A History of Oopsies in Economic Studies. See also: Dean Baker on In History of Economic Errors, Martin Feldstein Deserves Mention, Paul Krugman on another disastrous Excel error.

   See also: Felix Salmon on the R&R fiasco.

Links

1. Blog Discovery of the Year: Data Stories (Tag line: "... On India one chart at a time"). It's a personal blog maintained by "a Delhi based journalist" -- that's all we know about the blogger behind this wonderful site. Here's the first post. Here's a post with a catchy title -- We are the 5 %:

   I leave you to draw your own conclusions about what it means to be ‘privileged’ in this country. I also leave you with this question: If the census takers had asked each one of these households, what ‘class’ of society they thought they belonged to, or where they fit in within the income distribution, what do you think their response would have been ( and by ‘their’, I also mean ‘our’)?

2. NYTimes obituary: Robert G. Edwards Dies at 87; Changed Rules of Conception With First ‘Test Tube Baby’.

3. Amy Freitag at Southern Fried Science: I’m a scientist. A social scientist. Please opine on the validity of my discipline.

4. Jenny Rohn at Occam's Corner: Show me the money: is grant writing taking over science?

"Rise of the Poll Quants"

Tom Bartlett has a nice entry at The Chronicle on poll quants -- Nate Silver, Sam Wang, Drew Linzer and others -- whose statistical firepower has raised strong doubts about the mainstream punditry's claim to insights into who the American voters are likely to choose as their leader in today's elections.

It's a nice overview of what these quants are doing, and how they are doing it. Go read it.

Anirudh Krishna on Falling into Poverty

Like many other urban and middle-class Indians, I was raised to believe that people must be poor for some faults of their own. But these grandmothers’ tales disappeared like smoke when confronted with the reality that I experienced. Our team probed the factors associated with falling into poverty or remaining poor among a total of 35,000 households. Drunkenness, drug abuse, and laziness together accounted for no more than 3% of all instances (see Krishna 2010).

People are not poor because they wish to be poor or because of some character defect. Most have become poor due to influences beyond their personal control. These are the factors toward which preventive poverty policies must be geared. I will write of these factors in my next posting.

That's Prof. Anirudh Krishnaa, a professor of public policy and political science at Duke, discussing his research at the Ideas for India blog.

I came across his paper -- Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor: Who Gains, Who Loses, and Why? -- way back in 2006 [I blogged about it at HtOHL; BTW, that site is no more, but lives on at the Internet Archive]. Krishna has gone on to write a book on this research: One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How They Escape Poverty.

M. Rajshekhar: "A shrinking of world views"

He wonders why "we hardly see fiction about present-day rural India either written in English or translated into English?"

Seen any fiction recently about how the new lot of self-selecting government programmes are impacting rural India? Take NREGA. In Chhattisgarh and elsewhere, while the lot of the agricultural labour has improved after NREGA, small farmers are unable to afford labour now. [...]

Similarly, read any stories about environmental change in rural India? There is climate change, manifesting itself in erratic rainfall patterns across rural India. Or, for that matter, seen anything in your local bookshop about how villages are changing as our cities spill outwards — the rise in land values; the buzzing of real estate agents in and around villages looking for farmers willing to sell their land; and the younger rural generation, drawn by the gravitational pull of the cities, and only too aware that agriculture promises hard labour and uncertain gains, urging their parents to sell?

Sunil Khilnani on India's Knowledge Bankruptcy

Today, the Indian state seems particularly inept at generating the kind of knowledge it requires as it tries to realize its global aspirations. We have severe deficits when it comes to producing our own information, on the basis of which our strategic and policy decisions can be taken, our greatest long-term hopes pursued. The two major security threats we face, external and internal, embody this current lack.

From his latest Mint column. The external "security threat" Khilnani refers to is the once coming from Pakistan. But his views on the internal threat are worth highlighting:

...[The threat] emanating from the impoverished areas of the country in which Maoists are operating. We all acknowledge that these parts of the country are in great social and economic distress. But our sense of the nature of that distress is appallingly general. Our government and our social scientists lack the detailed, rigorous field studies that would illuminate, in a nuanced, non-ideological fashion, the key drivers and the casual [sic] chains that lead towards violent agitation. It’s all the more galling, then, to learn that it’s the Maoists themselves who turn out to be, in addition to gun-toting militants, rather expert social scientists with a more impressive grasp of the structures of contemporary agrarian society than our own government. Some in their membership have done real field work to advance plausible explanations of why so many Indian citizens feel compelled to take to armed revolt.

Is it true that "our social scientists lack the detailed, rigorous field studies" that illuminate "the key drivers and the casual [sic] chains that lead towards violent agitation"? Or is it the case that India's social scientists (and journalists and human rights activists) know a great deal about -- and understand -- the key drivers and the causal chains, but the Indian state has no intention of listening to them?