Category: Methodology

“We Need to Know What Works”

(p. A12) WASHINGTON–World Bank President Robert Zoellick challenged economists to take on tougher challenges in development economics and to consult a wider range of professionals in developing countries, opening a debate about how effectively economists have attacked problems in global poverty.

“Too often research economists seem not to start with the key knowledge gaps facing development practitioners, but rather search for questions they can answer with the industry’s currently favorite tools,” Mr. Zoellick said at Georgetown University.
. . .
“We need to know what works: we need a research agenda that focuses on results,” he said.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, who led a commission on economic growth, said Mr. Zoellick’s comments are “generally not only in the right direction, but very useful.” Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, who favors a stronger government hand in development, also praised the World Bank president. “The speech hits all the right notes: the need for economists to demonstrate humility, eschew blueprints…and focus on evaluation but not at the expense of the big questions,” Mr. Rodrik said.

For the full story, see:
BOB DAVIS. “World Bank Chief Ignites a Debate.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., SEPTEMBER 30, 2010): A12.
(Note: first two ellipses added; ellipsis in last quoted paragraph is in original.)

Science Can Contribute “Diligent Experimental Habits” to Technology

(p. 101) Nothing is more common in the history of science than independent discovery of the same phenomenon, unless it is a fight over priority. To this day, historians debate how much prior awareness of the theory of latent heat was in Watt’s possession, but they miss Black’s real contribution, which anyone can see by examining the columns of neat script that attest to Watt’s careful recording of experimental results. Watt didn’t discover the existence of latent heat from Black, at least not directly; but he rediscovered it entirely through exposure to the diligent experimental habits of professors such as Black, John Robison, and Robert Dick.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

A Key to Scientific Truth: Nullius in Verba (“On No One’s Word”)

(p. 68) . . . scientific understanding didn’t progress by looking for truth; it did so by looking for mistakes.

This was new. In the cartoon version of the Scientific Revolution, science made its great advances in opposition to a heavy-handed Roman Catholic Church; but an even larger obstacle to progress in the understanding and manipulation of nature was the belief that Aristotle had already figured out all of physics and had observed all that biology had to offer, or that Galen was the last word in medicine. By this standard, the real revolutionary manifesto of the day was written not by Descartes, or Galileo, but by the seventeenth-century Italian poet and physician Francesco Redi, in his Experiments on the Generation of Insects, who wrote (as one of a hundred examples), “Aristotle asserts that cabbages produce caterpillars daily, but I have not been able to witness this remarkable reproduction, though I have seen many eggs laid by butterflies on the cabbage-stalks. . . .” Not for nothing was the motto of the Royal Society nullius in verba: “on no one’s word.”

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: first ellipsis added; italics and second ellipsis, in original.)

“The Steam Engine Has Done Much More for Science than Science Has Done for the Steam Engine”

(p. 67) The great scientist and engineer William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, made his reputation on discoveries in basic physics. electricity, and thermodynamics, but he may be remembered just as well for his talent for aphorism. Among the best known of Kelvin’s quotations is the assertion that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting (while one probably best forgotten is the confident “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”). But the most relevant for a history of the Industrial Revolution is this: “the steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.”

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

Neurosurgeons Treating Dogs is Mutually Beneficial to Dogs and Humans

(p. D3) An operation commonly performed to remove brain tumors from the pituitary glands of humans is now available to dogs, thanks to a collaboration between a neurosurgeon and some veterinarians in Los Angeles. And that is turning out to be good for humans.

So far, nine dogs and one cat that otherwise would have died have been treated successfully.
. . .
What Dr. Mamelak has gained from teaching the procedure to veterinarians is access to tissue samples from the treated dogs. That’s significant because Cushing’s afflicts only one in a million humans, making it a difficult disease to study. By contrast, it afflicts about 100,000 dogs a year in the United States. The canine tissue samples are enabling him and his colleagues to develop drugs to one day treat Cushing’s disease in both humans and dogs.
“We have a full loop,” he said. “We’re using a human procedure in animals, and using their tissue to study the disease.”

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “Observatory; They Fetch, They Roll Over, They Aid Tumor Research.” The New York Times, Science Times Section (Tues., October 26, 2010): D3.
(Note: ellipsIs added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 22 (sic), 2010.)

Invention Aided By the Intelligent Hand and Spatial Intelligence

(p. 36) For centuries, certainly ever since Immanuel Kant called the hand the window on the mind,” philosophers have been pondering the very complex way in which the human hand is related to the human mind. Modern neuroscience and evolutionary biology have confirmed the existence of what the Scottish physician and theologian Charles Bell called the intelligent hand. Stephen Pinker of Harvard even argues that early humans’ intelligence increased partly because they were equipped with levers of influence on the world. namely the grippers found at the end of their two arms. We now know that the literally incredible amount of sensitivity and articulation of the human hand, which has increased at roughly the same pace as has the complexity of the human brain, is not merely a product of the pressures of natural selection, butt an initiator of it: The hand has led the brain to evolve just as much as the brain has led the hand. The hands of a pianist, or a painter, or a sushi chef, or even, as with Thomas New-(p. 37)comen, hands that could use a hammer to shape soft iron, are truly, in any functional sense, “intelligent.”

This sort of tactile intelligence was not emphasized in A. P. Usher’s theory of invention, the components of which he filtered through the early twentieth-century school of psychology known as Gestalt theory, which was preeminently a theory of visual behavior. The most important precepts of Gestalt theory (to Usher, anyway, who was utterly taken with their explanatory power) are that the patterns we perceive visually appear all at once, rather than by examining components one at a time, and that a principle of parsimony organizes visual perceptions into their simplest form. Or forms; one of the most famous Gestalt images is the one that can look like either a goblet or two facing profiles. Usher’s enthusiasm for Gestalt psychology explains why, despite his unshakable belief in the inventive talents of ordinary individuals, he devotes an entire chapter of his magnum opus to perhaps the most extraordinary individual in the history of invention: Leonardo da Vinci.
Certainly, Leonardo would deserve a large place in any book on the history of mechanical invention, not only because of his fanciful helicopters and submarines. hut for his very real screw cutting engine, needle making machine, centrifugal pumps, and hundreds more. And Usher found Leonardo an extraordinarily useful symbol in marking the transition in mechanics from pure intuition to the application of science and mathematics.
But the real fascination for Usher was Leonardo’s straddling of two worlds of creativity, the artistic and the inventive. No one, before or since, more clearly demonstrated the importance to invention of what we might call “spatial intelligence”; Leonardo was not an abstract thinker of any great achievement, nor were his mathematical skills, which he taught himself late in life, remarkable. (p. 38) His perceptual skills, on the other hand, developed primarily for his painting, were extraordinary, but they were so extraordinary that Usher could write, “It is only with Leonardo that the process of invention is lifted decisively into the field of the imagination. . . . “

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

Guidelines for Innovative Thinking?

innovation-cartoon.jpg Source of cartoon: http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/innovation-cartoon.jpg?w=361&h=364

The NYT ran the above cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Leo Cullum as part of Cullum’s obituary.

(p. A22) Leo Cullum, a cartoonist whose blustering businessmen, clueless doctors, venal lawyers and all-too-human dogs and cats amused readers of The New Yorker for the past 33 years, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 68 and lived in Malibu, Calif.

Mr. Cullum, a TWA pilot for more than 30 years, was a classic gag cartoonist whose visual absurdities were underlined, in most cases, by a caption reeled in from deep left field. “I love the convenience, but the roaming charges are killing me,” a buffalo says, holding a cellphone up to its ear. “Your red and white blood cells are normal,” a doctor tells his patient. “I’m worried about your rosé cells.”
. . .
His most popular cartoon, from 1998, showed a man addressing the family cat, which is sitting next to the litterbox. “Never, ever, think outside the box,” he says.

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “Leo Cullum, New Yorker Cartoonist, Dies at 68.” The New York Times (Tues., October 26, 2010): A22.
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated October 25, 2010.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Toricelli Experiment Dispoved Aristotlelian Theory that a Vacuum Was Impossible

(p. 8) Florence, in the year 1641, had been essentially the private fief of the Medici family for two centuries. The city, ground zero for both the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, was also where Galileo Galilei had chosen to live out the sentence imposed by the Inquisition for his heretical writings that argued that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo was seventy years old and living in a villa in Arcetri, in the hills above the city, (p. 9) when he read a book on the physics of movement titled De motu (sometimes Trattato del Moto) and summoned its author, Evangelista Torricelli, a mathematician then living in Rome. Torricelli, whose admiration for Galileo was practically without limit, decamped in time not only to spend the last three months of the great man’s life at his side, but to succeed him as professor of mathematics at the Florentine Academy.
. . .
(p. 9) . . . , Torricelli used a tool even more powerful than his well–cultivated talent for mathematical logic: He did experiments. At the behest of one of his patrons, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose engineers were unable to build a sufficiently powerful pump, Torricelli designed a series of apparatuses to test the limits of the action of contemporary water pumps. In spring of 1644, Torricelli filled a narrow, four-foot-long glass tube with mercury–a far heavier fluid than water–inverted it in a basin of mercury, sealing the tube’s top. and documented that while the mercury did not pour out, it did leave a space at the closed top of the tube. He reasoned that since nothing could have slipped past the mercury in the tube, what occupied the top of the tube must, therefore, be nothing: a vacuum.
. . .
(p. 10) Torricelli was not, even by the standards of his day, a terribly ambitious inventor. When faced with hostility from religious authorities and other traditionalists who believed, correctly, that his discovery was a direct shot at the Aristotelian world, he happily returned to his beloved cycloids, the latest traveler to find himself on the wrong side of the boundary line between science and technology
But by then it no longer mattered if Torricelli was willing to leave the messiness of physics for the perfection of mathematics: vacuum would keep mercury in the bottle, hut the genie was already out. Nature might have found vacuum repugnant for two thousand years, but Europe was about to embrace it.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics in original; ellipses added.)

How Scientific Progress Was Slowed By Too Much Respect for Aristotelian Theory

William Rosen has a wonderful early example of how too much respect for theory can keep us from making the observations that would eventually prove the theory to be wrong:

(p. 7) Aristotle argued against the existence of a vacuum with unerring, though curiously inelegant, logic. His primary argument ran something like this:

1. If empty space can be measured, then it must have dimension.
2. If it has dimension, then it must be a body (this is something of a tautology: by Aristotelian definition, bodies are things that have dimension).
3. Therefore, anything moving into such a previously empty space would he occupying the same space simultaneously, and two bodies cannot do so.
More persuasive was the argument that a void is unnecessary, that since the fundamental character of an object consists of those measurable dimensions, then a void with the same dimensions as the cup, or horse, or ship occupying it is no different from the object. One, therefore, is redundant, and since the object cannot be superfluous, the void must be.
It takes millennia to recover from that sort of unassailable logic, temptingly similar to that used in Monty Python and the Holy GraiI to demonstrate that if a woman weighs as much as a duck, she is a witch. Aristotle’s blind spot regarding the existence of a void would be inherited by a hundred generations of his adherents. Those who read the work of Heron did so through an Aristotelian scrim on which was printed, in metaphorical letters twenty feet high: NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Country Data on Light Intensity at Night May Be More Accurate than Official GDP

(p. 63) In a new working paper, Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard and David Weil of Brown University suggest an alternative source of data: outer space. In particular they track changes in the intensity of artificial light over a country at night, which should increase with incomes. American military weather satellites collect these data every night for the entire world.

It is hard to know exactly how much weight to put on extraterrestrial brightness. Changes in the efficiency of electricity transmission, for example, may cause countries to look brighter from outer space, even if economic activity has not increased much. But errors in its measurement are unlikely to be correlated with errors in the calculation of official GDP, since they arise for different reasons. A weighted average of the growth implied by changes in the intensity of artificial light and official GDP growth rates ought to improve the accuracy of estimates of economic growth. Poor countries in particular may have dodgy GDP numbers but their night-light data are as reliable as anyone else’s.

For the full story, see:
“Measuring growth from outer space; Light relief; Data about light emitted into space may help improve growth estimates.” The Economist (Aug. 6, 2009): 63.

The working paper referenced is:
Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil. “Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space.” NBER Working Paper No. 15199, July 2009.

CFOs Are Bad at Forecasting, and Don’t Realize They Are Bad

(p. 5) . . . , three financial economists — Itzhak Ben-David of Ohio State University and John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey of Duke — found that chief financial officers of major American corporations are not very good at forecasting the future. The authors’ investigation used a quarterly survey of C.F.O.’s that Duke has been running since 2001. Among other things, the C.F.O.’s were asked about their expectations for the return of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for the next year — both their best guess and their 80 percent confidence limit. This means that in the example above, there would be a 10 percent chance that the return would be higher than the upper bound, and a 10 percent chance that it would be less than the lower one.

It turns out that C.F.O.’s, as a group, display terrible calibration. The actual market return over the next year fell between their 80 percent confidence limits only a third of the time, so these executives weren’t particularly good at forecasting the stock market. In fact, their predictions were negatively correlated with actual returns. For example, in the survey conducted on Feb. 26, 2009, the C.F.O.’s made their most pessimistic predictions, expecting a market return of just 2.0 percent, with a lower bound of minus 10.2 percent. In fact, the market soared 42.6 percent over the next year.
It may be neither troubling nor surprising that C.F.O.’s can’t accurately predict the stock market’s path. If they could, they’d be running hedge funds and making billions. What is troubling, though, is that as a group, many of these executives apparently don’t realize that they lack forecasting ability. And, just as important, they don’t seem to be aware of how volatile the market can be, even in “normal” times.

For the full commentary, see:
RICHARD H. THALER: “Economic View; Often Wrong, But Never in Doubt.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., August 22, 2010): 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 21, 2010 and has the somewhat shorter title “Economic View; The Overconfidence Problem in Forecasting.”)

The Ben-David et al article is:
Ben-David, Itzhak, John R. Graham, and Campbell Harvey. “Managerial Miscalibration.” Fisher College of Business Working Paper No.2010-03-012, July 2010.