Living in the Fast Lane

I puzzle from time to time about why there was so much change in the past and so little now. But then I snap out of it. Here are some antidotes:

I pick up Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near and read his discussion about how the rate of discovery is accelerating and his vision of what lies ahead.

I read an article which points to new technology and discusses how fast things are changing. Here is a bit from an article on the science of genomes by Carl Zimmer:

Fifteen years ago, things were different. In 1995, scientists published the first complete genome of a free-living organisms ever–that of a nasty germ called Haemophilus influenzae. Bear in mind, this was in the dark ages of the twentieth century, when a scientist might spend a decade trying to decipher the sequence of a single gene.

...

Then came more microbes. Then, ten years ago this coming June, came a rough draft of the human genome. Then finished drafts of other animals: chickens, mice, flies, worms. Flowers, truffles, and malaria-causing parasites. They came faster and faster, cheaper and cheaper. The acceleration now means that the simple accomplishment of sequencing a genome is no longer news.

On Wednesday I caught a talk at Yale by Jonathan Rothberg, a scientist who invented “next-generation sequencing” in 2005. By sequencing vast numbers of DNA fragments at once, the new technology made it possible to get a genome’s sequence far faster than earlier methods. Rothberg’s company, 454, got bought up by Roche, leaving him without a lot to do. So he came up with a new machine: a genome sequencer about the size of a desktop printer that can knock out complete genomes with high accuracy in a matter of hours. Rothberg has been unveiling details of the machine over the past few weeks. To convince his audience that the machine actually works, he flashed another mandala wheel–the 4.7 million base pairs of E. coli.

I recalled when the first E. coli genome was published in 1997. It was the result of years of work by 17 co-authors, an event celebrated in newspapers. Now Rothberg just threw up a quick slide of the germ’s genome just to show what he could do in a matter of hours. And I have to say that the sight of yet another circular map of a genome, on its own, no longer gave me a thrill. It’s a bit like someone waving you over to a telescope and saying, “Look! I found a star!”

I remember the pre-history... back in the early 1970s I remember an impromptu seminar that the philosophers and grad students held when the issue of recombinant DNA came up and there was a question about banning it as "dangerous science". The discussion was on what was the ethical duty of scientists. Luckily the fanatics on either side ("stop it!" and "leave the scientists alone to do whatever they please") lost and common sense prevailed. The scientists halted research and quickly drew up guidelines for carrying out the research safely (using denatured E. Coli) so that even if the bugs escaped the outside world would be safe. They also defined levels of confinement based on risk. It was all very sensible. But that was the dark ages when nothing had really been decoded. Now a table top box can decode a whole genome in a couple of hours! Wow!

This is why some futurists are worried about biological terrorism. It is getting easier for a single person or small fanatical group to do something terrible. The world is a dangerous place. The answer isn't to stick your head in the ground. But you can't panic. Governments and concerned citizens need to look at the future and act like the recombinant DNA scientists: define rules & guidelines & monitor risk & have countermeasures ready in case some idiot does imperil the world.

Der Spiegel on Global Warming

Here is an eight part series in Der Spiegel on the state of climate science:

No other branch of science is as politically charged. A religious war is raging between alarmists and skeptics, and it threatens to consume levelheaded climatologists. But it is a critical conflict, because it revolves around something as massive as the total restructuring of industrial society, a venture that will cost trillions of euros. Powerful economic interests and unshakeable fundamental beliefs come into play.

The credibility crisis in climatology comes at an extremely unfavorable time. Since the failed December 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, environment policy has been in a state of shock. US President Barack Obama, for example, has put his initiative for new climate legislation on hold.

Part 1: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research
Part 2: Politically Charged Science
Part 3: A Climate Rebel Takes on the Establishment
Part 4: The Smoking Gun of Climatology
Part 5: The Reality of Rising Sea Levels
Part 6: The Myth of the Monster Storm
Part 7: Climate Change's Winners and Losers
Part 8: The Invention of the Two-Degree Target

This is an excellent series and well worth reading. It has gems such as:

There are also growing concerns at Germany's Ministry of Education and Research, which is spending €250 million ($338 million) to support climate science this year. Research Minister Annette Schavan has already summoned German IPCC scientists to attend a "meeting to clarify the situation and improve quality assurance." Officials at the ministry are horrified over how unprofessionally the IPCC is organized. "The IPCC's results must be above suspicion, because their impact can cost trillions and have serious political consequences," says Wilfried Kraus, a senior ministry official.

And this:

Reinhard Hüttl, head of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam near Berlin and the president of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, believes that basic values are now under threat. "Scientists should never be as wedded to their theories that they are no longer capable of refuting them in the light of new findings," he says. Scientific research, Hüttl adds, is all about results, not beliefs. Unfortunately, he says, there are more and more scientists who want to be politicians.

"If the revelations about the affair in England turn out to be true, it will be a catastrophe for climatology as a whole," says Hüttl. "We can only monitor ourselves, and if we fail in that endeavor, who can be expected to believe us anymore?"

Amy Alkon's "I See Rude People"

This was a romp through book. Amy Alkon is an advice columnist with a strong libertarian streak. She seems decent enough. I like her references to Adam Smith's "The Theory of Moral Sentiments". The references to evolutionary psychology and scholars like Robin Dunbar add authority to her opinions.

She presents herself as concerned about a lapse of good manners and calls for a crusade to put social responsibility back into our lives. She lays out a game plan for taking back public spaces from the boors and ill-mannered people who have proliferated since the late 1960s. (Yes, the "me" generation of the 1960s has indeed caused a blight on public spaces. The fight for civil rights and a more accountable government were good solid plusses from the 1960s, but the boorish behaviour that came along is definitely a downer.)

There are a number of stories she relates which are quite useful:

• How to catch an identity thief - tells the shocking story of how Bank of America's lax security practices creates havoc in its customer's lives and the indifference of the bank to this problem.


• How to catch a car thief - tells of her ups and downs in tracking down a car thief who stole her pink 1960 Nash Rambler. It points out how useless the police are in solving crimes that ordinary people face. But it also shows how persistence can pay off. It is a story with a relatively happy ending.


• How to catch a telemarkter - tells of her struggle to get a fake "survey" company to pay up for taking her time using its telemarketing ploy. She gives the ins and outs of struggle to overcome the toothless wonder known as "Do Not Call" list and get her day in court.

She paints herself as a nice person with a bit of a fanatic's tenacity in pursuing her rights and privileges. I don't think I would want her as a neighbor, but I can see that her persistence and tenacity has something to offer the larger society. She is too much of a "big personality" for me to handle, but I can certainly enjoy her personal accounts of taking on the world. It's a fun read.

Malfeasance at the Highest Levels

Robert Reich has a post on his blog giving news that shows illegal acts under the Bush administration:

The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns – taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans – in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout.

The losses from those deals still total tens of billions, and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook. But the public never knew. There was no congressional oversight. It was all done behind closed doors. And the New York Fed – then run by Tim Geithner – was very much in the center of the action.

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The Fed has a big problem. It acts in secret. That makes it an odd duck in a democracy. As long as it’s merely setting interest rates, its secrecy and political independence can be justified. But once it departs from that role and begins putting billions of dollars of taxpayer money at risk — choosing winners and losers in the capitalist system — its legitimacy is questionable.

That it chose to reveal the truth about its activities during a week when Congress is out of town, when much of official Washington and the Washington media have gone on vacation, and only after several federal courts have held that the Fed must release documents related to its bailout of Bear Stearns, suggests it would rather remain secret than become transparent.

He is awfully generous to say this puts the "Fed in hot water". The honest way to put it: this was a crime, a malfeasance in office, where officials exceeded their authority. Funny, this came from the very administration that argued for "limited" government, for "small" government.

But I guess when it comes to bailing out your business buddies, all that posturing about "theories of government" mean nothing. Money speaks louder than "principles".

What bugs me is that Timothy Geithner is still in power. Obama appointed him as a favour to the big Wall Street donors. The honest way to put it: Obama was bought by money.

Krugman on 'Too Big to Fail'

Here's a bit from the latest NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman:

It’s easy to see where concerns about banks that are “too big to fail” come from. In the face of financial crisis, the U.S. government provided cash and guarantees to financial institutions whose failure, it feared, might bring down the whole system. And the rescue operation was mainly focused on a handful of big players: A.I.G., Citigroup, Bank of America, and so on.

This rescue was necessary, but it put taxpayers on the hook for potentially large losses. And it also established a dangerous precedent: big financial institutions, we now know, will be bailed out in times of crisis. And this, it’s argued, will encourage even riskier behavior in the future, since executives at big banks will know that it’s heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.

The solution, say people like Mr. Volcker, is to break big financial institutions into units that aren’t too big to fail, making future bailouts unnecessary and restoring market discipline.

It’s a convincing-sounding argument, but I’m one of those people who doesn’t buy it.

Here’s how I see it. Breaking up big banks wouldn’t really solve our problems, because it’s perfectly possible to have a financial crisis that mainly takes the form of a run on smaller institutions. In fact, that’s precisely what happened in the 1930s, when most of the banks that collapsed were relatively small — small enough that the Federal Reserve believed that it was O.K. to let them fail. As it turned out, the Fed was dead wrong: the wave of small-bank failures was a catastrophe for the wider economy.

The same would be true today. Breaking up big financial institutions wouldn’t prevent future crises, nor would it eliminate the need for bailouts when those crises happen. The next bailout wouldn’t be concentrated on a few big companies — but it would be a bailout all the same. I don’t have any love for financial giants, but I just don’t believe that breaking them up solves the key problem.

So what’s the alternative to breaking up big financial institutions? The answer, I’d argue, is to update and extend old-fashioned bank regulation.

Go read the whole article. It is well worth your time.

I'm Ordering One of These for My House

This sure beats the Roomba vacuum cleaner. This is what UC Berkeley project in "personal robotics" has accomplished:



The only problem, this thing is as slow as molasses. You can tell they speeded up the film to "show off" the robot's clothes folding ability. It will take another generation to get this up to a tolerable speed. But the good news is that robots doing real work in the real world are getting closer. As with any exponential growth, the arrival of robots with real capabilities will surprise us because we have such a hard time understanding exponential growth, as shown by these stories.

Here is a vision of the near future by Peter Nowak from an article he published in The Globe and Mail. Here is the key bit:

The reality of the impending revolution hit me that day in Las Vegas. Robots are no longer science fiction; they aren’t just automated arms in car factories or cutesy toy dogs any more. They are here, they work (mostly) and they will soon be everywhere. Self-driving cars will be only one small phase of the coming wave. The global robotics market, made up mostly of those automated arms, was pegged at $17.3 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow massively over the next decade as new uses take off—up to $100 billion by one estimate. There are now an estimated fifty-five million robots in homes around the world in the form of toys, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and security monitors, and some people believe it won’t be long before every household has one. Indeed, the government of South Korea has mandated such a plan to be in effect by 2020. Robots will soon feed us, clothe us, wash us, keep us company and fetch us beer from the fridge. Eventually, we’ll even have robots to control those robots. Many look at the industry’s ramping growth and compare it to the early personal computer market of the seventies. “We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present,” says Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Models and Climate Change

There is an excellent post by Willis Eschenbach on the Watts Up With That? blog. The posting looks at "global warming" and is full of interesting points to be made. I especially enjoyed this one bit about modeling climate change:

Question 9. Are the models capable of projecting climate changes for 100 years?

My answer to this is a resounding “no”. The claim is often made that it is easier to project long-term climate changes than short-term weather changes. I see no reason to believe that is true. The IPCC says:

“Projecting changes in climate due to changes in greenhouse gases 50 years from now is a very different and much more easily solved problem than forecasting weather patterns just weeks from now. To put it another way, long-term variations brought about by changes in the composition of the atmosphere are much more predictable than individual weather events.” [from page 105, 2007 IPCC WG1, FAQ 1.2]

To me, that seems very doubtful. The problem with that theory is that climate models have to deal with many more variables than weather models. They have to model all of the variables that weather models contain, plus:

• Land biology

• Sea biology

• Ocean currents

• Ground freezing and thawing

• Changes in sea ice extent and area

• Aerosol changes

• Changes in solar intensity

• Average volcanic effects

• Snow accumulation, area, melt, and sublimation

• Effect of melt water pooling on ice

• Freezing and thawing of lakes

• Changes in oceanic salinity

• Changes in ice cap and glacier thickness and extent

• Changes in atmospheric trace gases

• Variations in soil moisture

• Alterations in land use/land cover

• Interactions between all of the above

• Mechanisms which tend to maximise the sum of work and entropy according to the Constructal Law.

How can a more complex situation be modeled more easily and accurately than a simpler situation? That makes no sense at all.

Next, the problem with weather models has been clearly identified as the fact that weather is chaotic. This means that no matter how well the model starts out, within a short time it will go off the rails. But the same is true for climate, it is also chaotic. Thus, there is no reason to assume that we can predict it any better than we can predict the weather. See Mandelbrot on the chaotic nature of climate.

Finally, climate models have done very poorly in the short-term. There has been no statistically significant warming in the last fifteen years. This was not predicted by a single climate model. People keep saying that the models do well in the long-term … but no one has ever identified when the changeover occurs. Are they unreliable up to twenty-five years and reliable thereafter? Fifty years?

Having built computer models I know how hard it is to validate the model (show that you are modeling what you claim to be modeling) and to verify the model (show that the model accurately represents the phenomenon you are modeling). I think climate models suffer on both fronts. As Eschenbach points out, they leave out a lot of detail. That's OK if the details are irrelevant. But it is pretty clear to me that the details are relevant, therefore the models are not valid. As for verifying the models, I have no special insight into that. But I do know that once you build something complex (say like a Toyota breaking system with a mechanical part and control software) it can be extremely difficult to verify that the model accurately does what it should under all conditions. As Eschenbach points out, the models offered so far are poor on modeling short term phenomena, so it is questionable how good they are at getting the long term phenomena.