Methodology – Page 20 – artdiamondblog.com

Successful Billionaire Mathematician Would Have Lost Math Contests, But Was Good at Slow Pondering

(p. D1) James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.
But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.
He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”
After that, he was fired.
His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you.
. . .
(p. D2) “I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world,” Dr. Simons said of his youthful math enthusiasms. “I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.”

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM J. BROAD. “Seeker, Doer, Giver, Ponderer; A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of Ferocious Curiosity.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 8, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 7, 2014.)

Perceptual Diversity Puzzle: Is It White-and-Gold or Blue-and-Black?

“The dress in a photo from Caitlin McNeill’s Tumblr site.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) The mother of the bride wore white and gold. Or was it blue and black?

From a photograph of the dress the bride posted online, there was broad disagreement. A few days after the wedding last weekend on the Scottish island of Colonsay, a member of the wedding band was so frustrated by the lack of consensus that she posted a picture of the dress on Tumblr, and asked her followers for feedback.
“I was just looking for an answer because it was messing with my head,” said Caitlin McNeill, a 21-year-old singer and guitarist.
. . .
Less than a half-hour after Ms. McNeil’s original Tumblr post, Buzzfeed posted a poll: “What Colors Are This Dress?” As of Friday afternoon, it had (p. B5) been viewed more than 28 million times. (White and gold was winning handily.)
. . .
Politicians were eager to stake out their positions. “I know three things,” wrote Senator Christopher Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, on Twitter. “1) the ACA works; 2) climate change is real; 3) that dress is gold and white.”
Sorry, senator. The dress, as we all now know, is blue and black. It goes for 50 pounds at Roman Originals, a British retailer.
. . .
Various theories were floated about why the dress looks different to different people. (No, if you see the darker hues of blue and black it doesn’t mean that you are depressed.)
Duje Tadin, associate professor for brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, says it may be because of variations in the number of photoreceptors called cones in the retina that perceive the color blue. The human eye has about six million cones that are sensitive to green, red or blue. Signals from the cones go to the brain, which interprets them as color.
“It’s puzzling,” conceded Dr. Tadin. “When it comes to color, blue is always the weird one. We have the fewest number of blue cones.” He added, “If you don’t have very many blue cones, you may see it as white, or if you have plenty of blue cones, you may see more blue.”
. . .
The one thing scientists could agree on was that this is a very unusual illusion. People who see the dress one way do not eventually begin to see it the other way, as is common with many optical illusions. “This clearly has to do with individual differences in how we perceive the world,” said Dr. Tadin. “There’s something about this particular image that just captures those differences in a remarkable way.

For the full story, see:
JONATHAN MAHLER. “The Dress That Melted the Internet.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 28, 2015): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 27, 2015, and has the title “The White and Gold (No, Blue and Black!) Dress That Melted the Internet.”)

Heckman Thinks that Economists Who Are Only Economists May Be Dangerous

The Journal of Political Economy, edited by the University of Chicago economics department, is one of the three or four most prestigious journals in the economics profession. For the last 20 years or so (if memory serves) the back cover of each issue has had a funny quote or interesting or unusual anecdote, related to some aspect of economics.
I was surprised to see that the quote from the October 2014 issue as “suggested by James J. Heckman.” Heckman is a Nobel-Prize-winner who is known mainly for developing new econometric techniques in the area of labor economics. When I was a graduate student at Chicago, his graduate students tended to be among those who were most oriented to formalism and technique. So I was surprised to see that he had suggested the following quote from neo-Austrian economist and fellow Nobel-Prize-winner F.A. Hayek:

(p. 463) But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist—and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.

Source:
Hayek, F. A. “The Dilemma of Specialization.” In The State of the Social Sciences, edited by Leonard D. White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
(Note: I do not have the book, and cannot find the page range of Hayek’s article in the book.)

“If You Want to Find Something New, Look for Something New!”

(p. D8) Yves Chauvin, who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for deciphering a “green chemistry” reaction now used to make pharmaceuticals and plastics more efficiently while generating less hazardous waste, died on Tuesday [January 27, 2015] in Tours, France.
. . .
He confessed that he was not a brilliant student, even in chemistry. “I chose chemistry rather by chance,” he wrote, “because I firmly believed (and still do) that you can become passionately involved in your work, whatever it is.”
Mr. Chauvin graduated from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry in 1954. Military service and other circumstances prevented him from pursuing a doctoral degree, which he said he regretted. “I had no training in research as such and as a consequence I am in a sense self-taught,” he wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture.
He worked in industry for a few years before quitting, frustrated by an inability to pursue new ideas. “My motto is more, ‘If you want to find something new, look for something new!’ ” Mr. Chauvin wrote. “There is a certain amount of risk in this attitude, as even the slightest failure tends to be resounding, but you are so happy when you succeed that it is worth taking the risk.”
He found the freedom to choose his research when he joined the French Petroleum Institute in 1960, and it led to his breakthrough on metathesis.
“Like all sciences, chemistry is marked by magic moments,” Mr. Chauvin wrote. “For someone fortunate enough to live such a moment, it is an instant of intense emotion: an immense field of investigation suddenly opens up before you.”

For the full obituary, see:

KENNETH CHANG. “Yves Chauvin, Chemist Sharing Nobel Prize, Dies at 84.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 31, 2015): D8.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 30, 2015.)

Double-Blind Clinical Trials Are NOT the Only Source of Good Evidence

(p. 16) Back in her office, . . . [rheumatologist Jennifer Frankovich] found that the scientific literature had no studies on patients like this to guide her. So she did something unusual: She searched a database of all the lupus patients the hospital had seen over the previous five years, singling out those whose symptoms matched her patient’s, and ran an analysis to see whether they had developed blood clots. “I did some very simple statistics and brought the data to everybody that I had met with that morning,” she says. The change in attitude was striking. “It was very clear, based on the database, that she could be at an increased risk for a clot.”
The girl was given the drug, and she did not develop a clot. “At the end of the day, we don’t know whether it was the right decision,” says Chris Longhurst, a pediatrician and the chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health, who is a colleague of Frankovich’s. But they felt that it was the best they could do with the limited information they had.
A large, costly and time-consuming clinical trial with proper controls might someday prove Frankovich’s hypothesis correct. But large, costly and time-consuming clinical trials are rarely carried out for uncommon complications of this sort. In the absence of such focused research, doctors and scientists are increasingly dipping into enormous troves of data that already exist — namely the aggregated medical records of thousands or even millions of patients to uncover patterns that might help steer care.
. . .
(p. 17) . . . , developing a “learning health system” — one that can incorporate lessons from its own activities in real time — remains tantalizing to researchers. Stefan Thurner, a professor of complexity studies at the Medical University of Vienna, and his researcher, Peter Klimek, are working with a database of millions of people’s health-insurance claims, building networks of relationships among diseases. As they fill in the network with known connections and new ones mined from the data, Thurner and Klimek hope to be able to predict the health of individuals or of a population over time. On the clinical side, Longhurst has been advocating for a button in electronic medical-record software that would allow doctors to run automated searches for patients like theirs when no other sources of information are available.
With time, and with some crucial refinements, this kind of medicine may eventually become mainstream. Frankovich recalls a conversation with an older colleague. “She told me, ‘Research this decade benefits the next decade,’ ” Frankovich says. “That was how it was. But I feel like it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.”

For the full story, see:
VERONIQUE GREENWOOD. “Eureka; Dr. DATA; Can Statistical Analysis Tell Us What Clinical Trials Cannot?” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., OCT. 5, 2014): 16-17.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 3, 2014, and has the title “Eureka; Can Big Data Tell Us What Clinical Trials Don’t?”)

“You Don’t Reach Serendip by Plotting a Course for It”

(p. 320) As John Barth wrote in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, “You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously.”28 The challenge for educational institutions, government policy, research centers, funding agencies, and, by extension, all modern medicine, will be how to encourage scientists to lose their bearings creatively. What they discover may just save our lives!

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

Outsiders Persevere to Pursue Breakthroughs

(p. 315) Despite all the examples given, mainstream medical research stubbornly continues to assume that new drugs and other advances will follow exclusively from a predetermined research path. Many, in fact, will. Others, if history is any indication, will not. They will come not from a committee or a research team but from an individual, a maverick who views a problem with fresh eyes. Serendipity will strike and be seized upon by a well-trained scientist or clinician who also dares to rely upon intuition, imagination, and creativity. Unbound by traditional theory, willing to suspend the usual set of beliefs, unconstrained by the requirement to obtain approval or funding for his or her pursuits, this outsider will persevere and lead the way to a dazzling breakthrough. Eventually, once the breakthrough becomes part of accepted medical wisdom, the insiders will pretend that the outsider was one of them all along.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Successful Discoverers “Follow the Evidence Wherever It Leads”

(p. 314) Why are particular people able to seize on such opportunities and say, “I’ve stumbled upon a solution. What’s the problem?” Typically, such people are not constrained by an overly focused or dogmatic mindset. In contrast, those with a firmly held set of preconceptions are less likely to be distracted by an unexpected or contradictory observation, and yet it is exactly such things that lead to the blessing of serendipitous discovery.
Serendipitous discoverers have certain traits in common. They have a passionate intensity. They insist on trying to see beyond their own and others’ expectations and resist any pressure that would close off investigation. Successful medical discoverers let nothing stand in their way. They break through, sidestep, or ignore any obstacle or objection to their chosen course, which is simply to follow the evidence wherever it leads. They have no patience with dogma of any kind.
The only things successful discoverers do not dismiss out of hand are contradictory–and perhaps serendipitously valuable–facts. They painstakingly examine every aspect of uncomfortable facts until they understand how they fit with other facts. Far from being cavalier about method, serendipitous discoverers subject their evidence and suppositions to the most rigorous methods they can find. They do not run from uncertainty, but see it as the raw material from which new scientific and medical certainties can be wrought.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

While Looking for Spotted Fever, He Found the Cause of Lyme Disease

(p. A25) Willy Burgdorfer, a medical entomologist who in 1982 identified the cause of what had been a mysterious affliction, Lyme disease, died on Monday [November 17, 2014] at a hospital in Hamilton, Mont. He was 89.
. . .
In the early 1980s, Dr. Burgdorfer was analyzing deer ticks from Long Island that were suspected to have caused spotted fever when he stumbled on something unexpected under his microscope: spirochetes, disease-causing bacteria shaped like corkscrews. They were located in only one section of the ticks, the so-called midguts. He had studied spirochetes in graduate school.
“Once my eyes focused on these long, snakelike organisms, I recognized what I had seen a million times before: spirochetes,” he said in a 2001 oral history for the National Institutes of Health, which include the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
He had not been working on Lyme disease, but he had spoken with the doctor who helped discover it, Dr. Allen Steere of Yale. After he saw the spirochetes in the Long Island ticks, he quickly realized that the bacteria might also be in the deer ticks believed to be playing a role in Lyme disease in Connecticut and elsewhere, including Long Island.

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM YARDLEY. “Willy Burgdorfer, Who Found Bacteria That Cause Lyme Disease, Is Dead at 89.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 20, 2014): A25.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date NOV. 19, 2014.)

“Peer Review Institutionalizes Dogmatism by Promoting Orthodoxy”

(p. 305) Peer review institutionalizes dogmatism by promoting orthodoxy. Reviewers prefer applications that mesh with their own perspective on how an issue should be conceptualized, and they favor individuals whom they know or whose reputations have already been established, making it harder for new people to break into the system.6 Indeed, the basic process of peer review demands conformity of thinking and disdains a maverick’s approach. “We can hardly expect a committee,” said the biologist and historian of science, Garrett Hardin, “to acquiesce in the dethronement of tradition. Only an individual can do that.”7 Young investigators get the message loud and clear: Do not challenge existing beliefs and practices.
So enmeshed in the conventional wisdoms of the day, so-called “peers” have again and again failed to appreciate major breakthroughs even when they were staring them in the face. This reality is evidenced by the fact that so many pioneering researchers were inappropriately scheduled to present their findings at undesirable times when few people were in the audience to hear about them.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

With Targeted Research, Scientists Not Allowed to Pursue Serendipitous Discoveries

(p. 303) When scientists were allowed to pursue whatever they found, serendipitous discovery flourished.
Today, targeted research is pretty much all there is. Yet, as Richard Feynman put it in his typical rough-hewn but insightful manner, giving more money “just increases the number of guys following the comet head.”2 Money doesn’t foster new ideas, ideas that drive science; it only fosters applications of old ideas, most often enabling improvements but not discoveries.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.