TheBigUpshot

Tell me that’s not a great title. It inspires the imagination. Magnetic cows? Some kind of robot, perhaps? Large enough to be visible from space? About to crush Manhattan under an Iron Hoof? I’m sold! Tell me more!

I hope you are as excited as I was because then I can have the pleasure of completely disappointing you.

Some people used satellite images (science via Google Earth!) to tabulate the preferred orientation of cows. They tend to align north-south. The scientists did the obvious corrections for wind, sun and local distractions (like ponds for drinking). It implies that cows have a sense of magnetism, like pigeons. Moo.

What are the global implications? Could cows find their way back to Capistrano? I don’t know. The motivations of our bovine friends are inscrutable. But I wonder if the researchers knew about Cow Magnets.

Cow magnets are big, powerful magnets that ranchers feed to cows. The magnets sit in one of the cow’s stomachs and if the cow eats a nail or a piece of barbed wire, the magnet keeps it in the first stomach so it doesn’t end up tearing up the whole digestive tract. Cows are very intelligent.

Here’s my question: How likely is it that the cow is facing north because that’s the preferred alignment of the 4 inch hunk of magnet in its stomach? I imagine I’d be pretty likely to face north if I had one of those in my belly.

-The Jester

Tags: Humor, Science by Jester
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I’m back! I’ve just read a perspective over at Science that made me think of Blink.  I have mentioned Blink before. It’s even linked over in the sidebar. It’s a book I like to think about. Some have denigrated it as anti-intellectualism, but I disagree. In fact, I think the mistake is revealing.

I will explain. The subject of Blink is intuition and unconscious thought. It turns out we have a lot of unconscious processing going on all of the time. The world we ’see’ is a necessarily greatly filtered. If you had to deal consciously with facts like the number of spokes in every bicycle wheel that passed you or the color of the shoelaces on each stranger’s feet, or the smell of every room you entered, it is doubtful you could stay sane.

Our brains have mechanisms for dealing with these stimuli (‘inconsequential’ sights, sounds and smells). The filter is very effective, but not perfect. That is to say, sometimes it ignores things that are consequential, and other times it flags trivial things as important.

The point of Blink is that we can train these parts of our brain (the parts of which we are not consciously aware) to make them more effective. People do it all of the time. Sports coaches often can read subtle cues about an athlete’s movement that the average person couldn’t notice. And they may not even be able to express consciously exactly what it was that they noticed. But by being ale to see, they can help the athlete refine their skill anyway.

Intellectuals think that this is counter to rational thought. It’s a cop-out, they say, to rely on unconscious parts of your brain. People who see Blink as anti-intellectual have the notion that reasonable, intelligent people don’t have to resort to such mystical clap-trap to solve problems. Thinkers, they suppose, will rely on their conscious rhetoric and careful analysis just like they always have. But this misses the point. It only reveals that these intellectuals see a false division between their rational selves and their more intuitive unconscious faculties.

The truth is that nobody can avoid relying on these parts of their brain. We rely on unconscious parts of our brain whether we like it or not. The part of us that is our ’self’ is not just the part that is narrating the internal monologue. It is an indefensible claim that the whole of our body including these lower parts of our consciousness is only present to get our higher cognitive faculties to meetings. The unconscious is as much a part of the whole as the conscious.

The part of me that is ‘me’ is more than the narrator of my internal monologue. Buddhists, who (arguably) have made the longest running investigation of consciousness, have known this for a long time. Science is finding it, too: “Studies such as that by Galdi et al. are documenting how the adaptive unconscious works and people’s limited introspective access to it. As these studies become more widely known, people might realize that … their conscious thoughts and feelings are but a small part of the workings of their minds.”

-Peter

Tags: Philosophy, Science by Peter
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Peter told me that since he was ‘busy’ with ‘getting engaged’ he didn’t have time to ‘filter’ my ‘unique perspective.’ He’s very diplomatic. What he means is that my brand of cynical bullshit requires a censor, and he doesn’t want to do it today. Well, I suppose that means that you get the unadulterated scoop.

Herman Tse of the University of Hong Kong wrote a letter to Nature the other day. Academics like to think of themselves as being above economic interests. They are interested in the passionate pursuit of knowledge. But Herman describes the problem: to fuel that pursuit requires support, and support is granted based on a metric. That metric is usually publications. His quote sums up the perspective of anyone who gets paid for something they love: “It would be hard to argue that the pressure to publish is somehow better or more meaningful than the pressure to recoup economic returns.”

That’s fine. Money is not the filthy bribe given to sellouts in exchange for their souls. But the pressure to recoup economic returns brings an agenda that is… problematic for basic research. It’s a kind of censorship. Research that won’t be profitable (or that looks like it won’t be profitable) won’t get done. Solid state semiconductors and “transistors” probably didn’t look like profitable research to people working on vacuum tubes. The fact that it was interesting to someone meant it could be published. The publication metric, though not inherently more meaningful, encourages a different subset of things to get done. It’s not the perfect subset, but at least it is a slightly different subset.

Take Kinsey. Plenty of people take issue with his data and his conclusions. Plenty more people would take issue with his sexual habits. But prior to his work, there was virtually no reliable body of knowledge about what turns people on. Only wild speculation. His research was worth more than a lascivious perusal; it helped change a culture. Would it have been done in the interest of economic value? Sex can be monetized, but can sex research?

And at the other end is something that looked economically promising: nuclear fusion

“Those who have been in the fusion business a long time believe that it is better to go ahead with ITER than to hope another device will get there first, says Hazeltine. Decades of promises and billions in investment have left international fusion research in what he describes as a fragile condition. ‘Fusion science is on the edge of vanishing,’ he says. ‘I think we need to go ahead and turn this damn thing on.’”

I couldn’t agree more.

-The Jester

Tags: Humor, Science by Jester
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Hallo from Munchen! It’s a fine afternoon in Bavaria. I am in a wonderful bakery where I had what appeared to be a large pretzel covered in cheese. It was great. Also I ordered a coffee and botched the order. I like a large cup of black coffee… I got a small cup of creamy coffee. I like coffee in any form, and I can use the calories what with all of the walking and excitement, but it’s outside my usual. Unusual fits the pattern of my life at the moment, really. In personal news: I just got engaged. That’s even better news than surprisingly good coffee!

So I was thinking about how I was going to manage this whole seeing-my-fiancée thing, what with her living 10 time zones away from me. That’s time zones, not area codes – as in: if it’s 1 PM at home, it’s 11 PM where she is.

For those of you who didn’t “tune in” during the last month, I managed to get the last data for my dissertation. I’ve been writing up while I am here. I’m going to defend one month after this little post, so things in the education department of my life are moving along. If I can get the PhD out of the way, I can start up as a Post-Doc in the same lab while I negotiate career and location changes. I expect that will take most of a year, and I would like to spend as much of it as possible in Ukraine.

I think I’m going to have to come up with a useful thing to do that I can do in Ukraine because this site (as much fun as it is) will probably not pay the bills for a while yet. Still, I’m enjoying it, so I’m going to post here some of the story of this somewhat unique and romantic journey as I try to accomplish several things:

Acquire a K-1 visa for My fiancée

Advance a scientific career

Earn enough money to live

Maintain health, sanity and contribution

What I learned last month is something about efficient work on individual projects. In group projects, “efficiency” can be counterproductive if it comes at the expense of production capacity. Production capacity in collaboration is rooted in strong relationships. Demanding efficiency degrades strong relationships. QED. Individual projects are another matter. Few people have very individual projects. I happen to have both kinds. For collaboration, patiently dealing with interruptions in a way that is relationship-building and helpful makes it possible to ask a lot of people.

In my current job, production is measured in publications. I can help make publications by doing two things: 1. write papers and 2. help people write papers. But I only get credit for production in case 1. So when I help others, I expect a bit of quid pro quo. So I can be the most productive both in the global (overall papers from the lab) and personal (papers with my name in front) sense if I work on my own, personal project and also have projects in which I help others and they help me. The projects in the quid-pro-quo category inevitably take up 6 hours every day. They require meetings, interruptions, discussions, and so on. There’s no way to avoid it without crippling the process. But 2 hours a day is not enough to make rapid progress in the personal-project department. I need about 8 hours a day for that (4 for thinking, planning and set-up, 3 for experiment, 1 for clean-up). That’s 14 hours a day. And that’s what I did in July. And it sucked, but it made more progress in 1 month than I usually make in 3. Why? Because normally I can only steal 1 day per week for the whole 8 hour personal project work. Working 14 hour days, I get maximal personal-project without sacrificing collaborative production. We’ll see how that works out.

-Peter

Tags: Life Management by Peter
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I’m still in Germany and I’m having a great time. Writing the dissertation is a slow, but steady process. I think I’m done processing the data for which I worked so hard last month. It lines up nicely.

I read an interesting article in Newsweek on Monday that I wanted to share with you all. The notion was that scientists (Frank et. al. 2007 ) found evidence that there is a genetic link to a person’s ability to learn from mistakes. I honestly don’t know how controversial that is. It seems pretty common-sense to me. Some people will be more able than others to discern when they have made a mistake, and upon realizing this, some people will be more able than others to change their own behavior.

If anything, the controversial issue (and the thing that is the subtle beauty of the proposition) is that this in not trained. It seems intuitive to think that if someone doesn’t learn from their mistakes, they could be trained to do so. This result, if true, suggests that the degree of trainability is, itself, variable.

I imagine this has implications for parents everywhere. Take a child who is less capable of intuiting that a repeated mistake will have repeatable consequences. That child should be reared differently than one who immediately modifies behaviors in after making a mistake. A child who responds immediately might be allowed to make some mistakes so that he will learn limits on his own before mistakes are life-threatening. On the other hand, such mistakes will be less useful experiences for the child with this newly identified genetic condition.

But what about the subtle implications? This also suggests that the degree of “habit plasticity” is variable among the population. It suggests that there are outliers on both sides: people who need external structure and limits to survive, and people who will immediately adapt their behavior to the social structure around them. Furthermore, I would venture to guess that this won’t correlate with intelligence or other personality traits (e.g. introversion/extroversion). In fact, it is more like a meta-trait.

Take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It has 4 dimensions along which a person will score somewhere on a continuum. People who score any given way on the test will tend to have certain preferred modes of living. What this new result suggests is that, for some people, this preference is more fixed than others.

If nothing else, it’s a caveat on any predictions based on most psychological tests.

-Peter

Tags: Leadership, Philosophy, Science by Peter
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