Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

• Artificial Intelligence, Really, Is Pseudo-Intelligence

  One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.

  ... But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life -- the amoeba, for example -- exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value. It seeks nourishment. It makes itself -- and in making itself it introduces meaning into the universe.
  Now, admittedly, unicellular organisms are not very bright -- but they are smarter than clocks and supercomputers. For they possess the rudimentary beginnings of that driven, active, compelling engagement that we call life and that we call mind. Machines don't have information. We process information with them. But the amoeba does have information -- it gathers it, it manufactures it.

• Treating disease with fecal transplants

  Some disease sufferers have benefitted from fecal transplantation, in which a healthy person's stool is transferred to a sick person's colon.

  Then, in January, 2013, The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the first randomized controlled trial involving FMT, comparing the therapy to treatment with vancomycin for patients with recurrent disease. The trial was ended early when doctors realized that it would be unethical to continue: fewer than a third of the patients given vancomycin recovered, compared with ninety-four per cent of those who underwent fecal transplants -- the vast majority after a single treatment. A glowing editorial accompanying the article declared that the trial's significance "goes far beyond the treatment of recurrent or severe C. difficile" and predicted a spate of research into the benefits of fecal transplants for other diseases.
  

• Doubling Saturated Fat in the Diet Does Not Increase Saturated Fat in Blood

  New research links diabetes, heart disease risk to diet high in carbs, not fat.
  But note:
  

  This work was supported by the Dairy Research Institute, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the Egg Nutrition Center.

• Weight influenced by microbes in the gut

  Our genetic makeup influences whether we are fat or thin by shaping which types of microbes thrive in our body, according to a study by researchers at King's College London and Cornell University.
  By studying pairs of twins at King's Department of Twin Research, researchers identified a specific, little known bacterial family that is highly heritable and more common in individuals with low body weight. This microbe also protected against weight gain when transplanted into mice.

• What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change

  Today's renewable energy technologies won't save us.

  Google's boldest energy move was an effort known as RE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do.

  ... As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

  ... What's needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years.

• Forvo: All the words in the world pronounced by native speakers

  Worlds largest pronunciation guide: 2,655,619 words 2,804,143 pronunciations 322 languages

• Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone -- Especially the Wealthy

  "Wealth -- its uses and abuses -- is a subject that has intrigued me since my youth in the rural Midwest," West writes in the introduction to his study of billionaires. From his seat in Washington, D.C., he has grown concerned about the effects on democracy of a handful of citizens controlling more and more wealth.

• Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don't Think They're Smart

  But praising their intelligence can make them feel even more insecure. A self-esteem expert offers a way out of the conundrum.

  They (parents) often praise the ability, the talent, or the intelligence too much. The opposite of this is the good process praise. This is praise for the process the child engages in -- their hard work, trying many strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their use of errors to learn, their improvement.
  

• Comforting the NSA and Afflicting Its Dissenters

  Defending Edward Snowden from criticism by Yishai Schwartz in the New Republic.

  No serious defense of the surveillance state can ignores its anti-democratic abuses, its lawbreaking, and its record of punishing whistleblowers.
  

• Even Israel's Best Friends Understand That It Is Disconnecting From Reality

  A lead editorial in The New York Jewish Week, the flagship American Jewish newspaper, center to center-right in orientation, with many thousands of Orthodox Jews among its readers and an ardently pro-Israel editorial line, bluntly asks whether the Israeli government has become unmoored from reality.

  ... It also means understanding that while most settlement expansion that is now taking place in the West Bank is happening in areas that will most likely come under Israeli control in the event of a final peace deal, the Palestinians haven't agreed to this division yet. Unilateral moves do not help. They certainly don't help Israel's international standing, which is lower than it has ever been, and they certainly don't help maintain Israel as a cause that garners bipartisan support in the U.S.

• Can you build up a tolerance to ice cream?

  Research suggests that those individuals who frequently eat a given highly palatable food derive less satisfaction from the subsequent consumption of that same food, such as ice cream.
  ... In short, this study found an inverse relationship between the frequency of ice cream consumption and the activation of the brain's reward centers in response to ingesting an ice cream milk shake.
  ... In a sense, the observation is similar to the developed drug tolerance seen among drug addicts, where the high of the second hit is never as good as the first.

  I eat ice cream every day but don't notice that effect.

• http://nextcenturycities.org

  Next Century Cities supports communities and their elected leaders, including mayors and other officials, as they seek to ensure that all have access to fast, affordable, and reliable Internet.
  It is a consortium of 32 cities with the mission of making 1 Gbps fiber-based broadband available to any community in the United States.

• A New Macroeconomic Strategy by Jeffrey D. Sachs

  It is time for a new strategy, one based on sustainable, investment-led growth.

  Most high-income countries -- the US, most of Europe, and Japan -- are failing to invest adequately or wisely toward future best uses. There are two ways to invest -- domestically or internationally -- and the world is falling short on both.

  ...
  Though policy alternates between supply-side and neo-Keynesian enthusiasm, the one persistent reality is a significant decline of investment as a share of national income in most high-income countries in recent years. According to IMF data, gross investment spending in these countries has declined from 24.9% of GDP in 1990 to just 20% in 2013.
  In the US, investment spending declined from 23.6% of GDP in 1990 to 19.3% in 2013, and fell even more markedly in net terms (gross investment excluding capital depreciation). In the European Union, the decline was from 24% of GDP in 1990 to 18.1% in 2013.
  Neither neo-Keynesians nor supply-siders focus on the true remedies for this persistent drop in investment spending. Our societies urgently need more investment, particularly to convert heavily polluting, energy-intensive, and high-carbon production into sustainable economies based on the efficient use of natural resources and a shift to low-carbon energy sources. Such investments require complementary steps by the public and private sectors.

• Why Experts Reject Creativity

  People think they like creativity. But teachers, scientists, and executives are biased against new ways of thinking.

  In 1997, Clayton Christensen coined the term "the Innovator's Dilemma" to describe the choice companies face between incrementally improving their core business (perfecting old ideas) and embracing emerging markets that could upend their core business (investing in new ideas).

  ... Indeed, it turns out that our aversion to new ideas touches more than technology companies. It affects entertainment executives deciding between new projects, managers choosing between potential projects or employees, and teachers assessing conformist versus non-conformist children. It is a bias against the new. The brain is hardwired to distrust creativity.

  ... The researchers found that new ideas -- those that remixed information in surprising ways -- got worse scores from everyone, but they were particularly punished by experts. "Everyone dislikes novelty," Lakhami explained to me, but "experts tend to be over-critical of proposals in their own domain." Knowledge doesn't just turn us into critical thinkers. It maybe turns us into over-critical thinkers. (In the real world, everybody has encountered a variety of this: A real or self-proclaimed expert who's impatient with new ideas, because they challenge his ego, piercing the armor of his expertise.)

Some links related to the understanding and practice of science that interest me.

• Understanding Research

  Series from The Conversation -- Academic Rigour, Journalistic Flair

  • Why research beats anecdote in our search for knowledge
  • Clearing up confusion between correlation and causation
  • Where's the proof in science? There is none
  • Positives in negative results: when finding `nothing' means something
  • The risks of blowing your own trumpet too soon on research
  • How to find the knowns and unknowns in any research
  • How myths and tabloids feed on anomalies in science
  • The 10 stuff-ups we all make when interpreting research
    1. Wait! That's just one study!
    2. Significant doesn't mean important
    3. And effect size doesn't mean useful
    4. Are you judging the extremes by the majority?
    5. Did you maybe even want to find that effect?
    6. Were you tricked by sciencey snake oil?
    7. Qualities aren't quantities and quantities aren't qualitites
    8. Models by definition are not perfect representations of reality
    9. Context matters
    10. And just because it's peer reviewed that doesn't make it right

    And finally ... Research is a human endeavour and as such is subject to all the wonders and horrors of any human endeavour.

• The evidence crisis, by Jim Baggott

  it seems science is confronted with nothing less than a crisis of evidence

  Last year Jim Baggott published a book, called Farewell to Reality, which challenges some of the prevailing opinions about contemporary theoretical physics of the kind which address our `big questions' concerning the nature of the physical universe. In it I argue that some theorists have crossed a line. They are suffering a `grand delusion,' a belief that they can describe physical reality using mathematics alone, with no foundation in scientific evidence. I call the result `fairy-tale' physics.

• How our botched understanding of 'science' ruins everything

  Intellectuals of all persuasions love to claim the banner of science. A vanishing few do so properly.

  What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things and instead tests empirical theories through controlled investigation. Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering -- of trial by error. Scientific knowledge is not "true" knowledge, since it is knowledge about only specific empirical propositions -- which is always, at least in theory, subject to further disproof by further experiment.

• Scientific consensus has gotten a bad reputation - and it doesn't deserve it

  It's used by both sides in the climate debates, but consensus is part of a process.

  Reproducible results are absolutely relevant. What Crichton is missing is how we decide that those results are significant and how one investigator goes about convincing everyone that he or she happens to be right. This comes down to what the scientific community as a whole accepts as evidence.
  There have clearly been times in the past where the consensus wasn't especially brilliant. Mendel was ignored instead of starting to build a consensus, and Alfred Wegner's formative ideas about plate tectonics were roundly ridiculed. But it's worth noting that these cases are the exception. The majority of the time, the consensus is a bit closer to being right than whatever came before it. And while it may be slow to change sometimes, it can eventually be shifted by the weight of the evidence.