Science – Page 32 – artdiamondblog.com

Cancer Will Likely Be Cured by “Lone Wolves, Awkward Individualists, Nonconformists”

Morton Meyers quotes Ernst Chain, who received the Nobel Prize in 1945, along with Fleming and Florey, for developing penicillin:

(p. 81) But do not let us fall victims of the naive illusion that problems like cancer, mental illness, degeneration or old age… can be solved by bulldozer organizational methods, such as were used in the Manhattan Project. In the latter, we had the geniuses whose basic discoveries made its development possible, the Curies, the Rutherfords, the Einsteins, the Niels Bohrs and many others; in the biologic field… these geniuses have not yet appeared…. No mass attack will replace them…. When they do appear, it is our job to recognize them and give them the opportunities to develop their talents, which is not an easy task, for they are bound to be lone wolves, awkward individualists, nonconformists, and they will not very well fit into any established organization.

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

“Seeing What Everybody Has Seen and Thinking What Nobody Has Thought”

Szent-Györgyi is onto something important below. But I think it would be more accurate to say that we all experience dissonant events (but usually not the same dissonant events, as Szent-Györgyi implies), and that most of us let the events pass without noticing, or remembering, or making use of them. What is rare is to notice the events, remember them and make use of them. Those who carry around with them the burden of unsolved problems, and unfixed frustrations, are more likely to see in unexpected events solutions to those problems and fixes for the frustrations. This all takes the effort of our better self (what Kahneman calls our System 2). It takes effort to carry around the problems, to bear the dissonant observations, and to suffer the indifference of friends and the ridicule of experts. But it is through such effort that we better understand the world and, most importantly, that we improve the world.

(p. 12) “Discovery (p. 13) consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought,” according to Nobelist Albert Szent-Györgyi.14
. . .
(p. 324) 14. Albert Szent-Györgyi, Bioenergetics (New York: Academic Press, 1957), 57.

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

Pause in Global Warming Invalidates Climate-Change Models

(p. A13) When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas said in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was “wrong, completely wrong,” and was “deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public.”
We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse’s article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998,” wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: “Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”
If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more.”
Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years–depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That’s according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “OPINION; Whatever Happened to Global Warming? Now come climate scientists’ implausible explanations for why the ‘hiatus’ has passed the 15-year mark.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Sept. 5, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 4, 2014.)

The article mentioned above by economist McKitrick is:
McKitrick, Ross R. “HAC-Robust Measurement of the Duration of a Trendless Subsample in a Global Climate Time Series.” Open Journal of Statistics 4 (2014): 527-35. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojs.2014.47050

For a possible deeper explanation of the McKitrick results, you may consult:
McMillan, David G., and Mark E. Wohar. “The Relationship between Temperature and CO2 Emissions: Evidence from a Short and Very Long Dataset.” Applied Economics 45, no. 26 (2013): 3683-90.

Theory Said Giant Bird Could Not Fly, But It Flew Anyway

(p. A3) Scientists have identified the largest flying bird ever found–an ungainly glider with a wingspan of 21 feet or more that likely soared above ancient seas 25 million years ago.
Until now, though, it was a bird that few experts believed could get off the ground. By the conventional formulas of flight, the extinct sea bird–twice the size of an albatross, the largest flying bird today–was just too heavy to fly on its long, fragile wings.
But a new computer analysis reported Monday [July 7, 2014] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the bird apparently could ride efficiently on rising air currents, staying aloft for a week or more at a stretch.
. . .
“You have to conclude that this animal was capable of flapping its wings and taking off, even though it is much heavier than the theoretical maximum weight of a flapping flying bird,” said Luis Chiappe, an expert on flight evolution at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, who wasn’t involved in the project. “Our modern perspective on the diversity of flight is rather narrow,” he said. “These were very unique birds.”
. . .
“This was a pretty impressive creature,” said avian paleontologist Daniel T. Ksepka at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., who conducted the analysis of the bird’s biomechanics. “Science had made a rule about flight, and life found a way around it.”

For the full story, see:
ROBERT LEE HOTZ. “U.S. NEWS; Giant Bird Was Able to Fly, Scientists Find; Computer Analysis Shows Ancient Glider Could Get Off the Ground, Defying Conventional Theories of Flight.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 8, 2014): A3.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date July 7, 2014.)

Serendipitous Discoveries Are Made by “Accidents and Sagacity”

(p. 6) “Accident” is not really the best word to describe such fortuitous discoveries. Accident implies mindlessness. Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the American continent was pure accident–he was looking for something else (the Orient) and stumbled upon this, and never knew, not even on his dying day, that he had discovered a new continent. A better name for the phenomenon we will be looking at in the pages to follow is “serendipity,” a word that came into the English language in 1754 by way of the writer Horace Walpole. The key point of the phenomenon of serendipity is illustrated in Walpole’s telling of an ancient Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip (set in the land of Serendip, now known as Sri Lanka): “As their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
Accidents and sagacity. Sagacity–defined as penetrating intelligence, keen perception, and sound judgment–is essential to serendipity. The men and women who seized on lucky accidents that happened to them were anything but mindless. In fact, their minds typically had special qualities that enabled them to break out of established paradigms, imagine new possibilities, and see that they had found a solution, often to some problem other than the one they were working on. Accidental discoveries would be nothing without keen, creative minds knowing what to do with them.

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

Modelers Can Often Obtain the Desired Result

(p. A13) After earning a master’s degree in environmental engineering in 1982, I spent most of the next 10 years building large-scale environmental computer models. My first job was as a consultant to the Environmental Protection Agency. I was hired to build a model to assess the impact of its Construction Grants Program, a nationwide effort in the 1970s and 1980s to upgrade sewer-treatment plants.
The computer model was huge–it analyzed every river, sewer treatment plant and drinking-water intake (the places in rivers where municipalities draw their water) in the country. I’ll spare you the details, but the model showed huge gains from the program as water quality improved dramatically. By the late 1980s, however, any gains from upgrading sewer treatments would be offset by the additional pollution load coming from people who moved from on-site septic tanks to public sewers, which dump the waste into rivers. Basically the model said we had hit the point of diminishing returns.
When I presented the results to the EPA official in charge, he said that I should go back and “sharpen my pencil.” I did. I reviewed assumptions, tweaked coefficients and recalibrated data. But when I reran everything the numbers didn’t change much. At our next meeting he told me to run the numbers again.
After three iterations I finally blurted out, “What number are you looking for?” He didn’t miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed. I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
. . .
There are no exact values for the coefficients in models such as these. There are only ranges of potential values. By moving a bunch of these parameters to one side or the other you can usually get very different results, often (surprise) in line with your initial beliefs.

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT J. CAPRARA. “OPINION; Confessions of a Computer Modeler; Any model, including those predicting climate doom, can be tweaked to yield a desired result. I should know.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 9, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 8, 2014.)

Similarities Between Lucretius and Galileo

(p. 254) Like Lucretius, Galileo defended the oneness of the celestial and terrestrial world: there was no essential difference, he claimed, between the nature of the sun and the planets and the nature of the earth and its inhabitants. Like Lucretius, he believed that everything in the universe could be understood through the same disciplined use of observation and reason. Like Lucretius, he insisted on the testimony of the senses, against, if necessary, the orthodox claims of authority. Like Lucretius, he sought to work through this testimony toward a rational comprehension of the hidden structures of all things. And like Lucretius, he was convinced that these structures were by nature constituted by what he called “minims” or minimal particles, that is, constituted by a limited repertory of atoms combined in innumerable ways.

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

“The Metric System Can Be Our Operating System Without Being Our Interface”

(p. C6) The outcome was perhaps foreshadowed, as Mr. Marciano points out, when President Ford, using a customary unit, noted that American industries were “miles ahead” when it came to adopting the metric system.
Mr. Marciano tells his story more or less without editorializing, until the end. Surveying the centuries of fights over measurement, he finishes on a rather intriguing point: Standardization no longer matters that much.
. . .
. . . , with the computerization of life, we don’t have to worry about converting from one measurement to another; our software does this for us. We can still speak in pounds or feet, even if everything in the world of manufacturing and technology is really, at bottom, done in the metric system. In the evocative terminology of Mr. Marciano, “the metric system can be our operating system without being our interface.”

For the full review, see:
SAMUEL ARBESMAN. “Liters and Followers; Gerald Ford once proudly declared the country was ‘miles ahead’ in converting to the metric system.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 2, 2014): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 1, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘Whatever Happened to the Metric System?’ by John Bemelmans Marciano; Gerald Ford once proudly declared the country was ‘miles ahead’ in converting to the metric system.” )

The book being reviewed is:
Marciano, John Bemelmans. Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2014.

Climate Models Allow “the Modeler to Obtain Almost Any Desired Result”

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are the commonly-used models that attempt to integrate climate science models with economic effect models. In the passage quoted below, “SCC” stands for “social cost of carbon.”

(p. 870) I have argued that IAMs are of little or no value for evaluating alternative climate change policies and estimating the SCC. On the contrary, an IAM-based analysis suggests a level of knowledge and precision that is nonexistent, and allows the modeler to obtain almost any desired result because key inputs can be chosen arbitrarily.

As I have explained, the physical mechanisms that determine climate sensitivity involve crucial feedback loops, and the parameter values that determine the strength of those feedback loops are largely unknown. When it comes to the impact of climate change, we know even less. IAM damage functions are completely made up, with no theoretical or empirical foundation. They simply reflect common beliefs (which might be wrong) regarding the impact of 2º C or 3º C of warming, and can tell us nothing about what might happen if the temperature increases by 5º C or more. And yet those damage functions are taken seriously when IAMs are used to analyze climate policy. Finally, IAMs tell us nothing about the likelihood and nature of catastrophic outcomes, but it is just such outcomes that matter most for climate change policy. Probably the best we can do at this point is come up with plausible estimates for probabilities and possible impacts of catastrophic outcomes. Doing otherwise is to delude ourselves.

For the full article, see:
Pindyck, Robert S. “Climate Change Policy: What Do the Models Tell Us?” Journal of Economic Literature 51, no. 3 (Sept. 2013): 860-72.

Catholic Church Banned Infinitesimals from European Classrooms Taught by Jesuits

Source of book image: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/04/08/science/08SCIB/08SCIB-superJumbo.jpg

(p. C9) Mr. Alexander’s narrative opens in the early 17th century, when Catholic Church administrators in Rome, following a campaign by Euclidean stalwart Christopher Clavius, banned the infinitesimal from the classrooms of Jesuit schools throughout Europe. Instructors’ teachings and writings were monitored to enforce strict adherence to the classical Euclidean geometrical tradition. Mr. Alexander portrays the church’s reactionary stance not as a huff over mathematical philosophy but as a desperate counterattack against existential threats: Euclid’s rules-based structure offered the church a model with which it hoped to rein in a restive flock, roiled by economic and political currents and by an ascendant Protestantism. Martial metaphors abound in the author’s telling: “war against disorder,” “enemies of the infinitely small,” “forces of hierarchy and order.” This was no friendly debate.

For the full review, see:
ALAN HIRSHFELD. “The Limit of Reason; In the 1700s, the idea of an infinitely tiny quantity was so unsettling that the Church banned it from classrooms.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 3, 2014): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 2, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘Infinitesimal’ by Amir Alexander; The idea of an infinitely tiny quantity–the foundation of calculus–was so unsettling that in the 17th century the Church banned it from classrooms.”)

The book under review is:
Alexander, Amir. Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Global Warming Tipping Point Models Are “Overblown”

(p. C3) Climate models for north Africa often come to contradictory conclusions. Nonetheless, mainstream science holds that global warming will typically make wet places wetter and dry places drier–and at a rapid clip. That is because increased greenhouse gases trigger feedback mechanisms that push the climate system beyond various “tipping points.” In north Africa, this view suggests an expanding Sahara, the potential displacement of millions of people on the great desert’s borders and increased conflict over scarce resources.
One scientist, however, is challenging this dire view, with evidence chiefly drawn from the Sahara’s prehistoric past. Stefan Kröpelin, a geologist at the University of Cologne, has collected samples of ancient pollen and other material that suggest that the earlier episode of natural climate change, which created the Sahara, happened gradually over millennia–not over a mere century or two, as the prevailing view holds. That is why, he says, the various “tipping point” scenarios for the future of the Sahara are overblown.
The 62-year-old Dr. Kröpelin, one of the pre-eminent explorers of the Sahara, has traveled into its forbidding interior for more than four decades. Along the way he has endured weeklong dust storms, a car chase by armed troops and a parasitic disease, bilharzia, that nearly killed him.
. . .
. . . Dr. Kröpelin’s analysis of the Lake Yoa samples suggests that there was no tipping point and that the change was gradual. He says that his argument is also supported by archaeological evidence. Digs in the Sahara, conducted by various archaeologists over the years, indicate that the people of the region migrated south over millennia, not just in a few desperate decades. “Humans are very sensitive climate indicators because we can’t live without water,” he says. If the Sahara had turned to desert quickly, the human migration pattern “would have been completely different.”

For the full commentary, see:
Naik, Gautam. “Climate Clues in the Sahara’s Past; A Geologist’s Findings in Africa Challenge the Way Scientists Think about the Threat of Desertification.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 31, 2014): C3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 30, 2014, and has the title “How Will Climate Change Affect the Sahara?; A geologist’s findings in Africa challenge the way scientists think about the threat of desertification.”)

One of the more recent Kröpelin papers arguing against the tipping point account is:
Francus, Pierre, Hans von Suchodoletz, Michael Dietze, Reik V. Donner, Frédéric Bouchard, Ann-Julie Roy, Maureen Fagot, Dirk Verschuren, Stefan Kröpelin, and Daniel Ariztegui. “Varved Sediments of Lake Yoa (Ounianga Kebir, Chad) Reveal Progressive Drying of the Sahara During the Last 6100 Years.” Sedimentology 60, no. 4 (June 2013): 911-34.