Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Yes, the American Economy Is in a Funk -- But Not for the Reasons You Think

  Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics Podcast

  As sexy as the digital revolution may be, it can't compare to the Second Industrial Revolution (electricity! the gas engine! antibiotics!), which created the biggest standard-of-living boost in U.S. history. The only problem, argues the economist Robert Gordon, is that the Second Industrial Revolution was a one-time event. So what happens next?
  ...
  Robert Gordon is an economist at Northwestern University and the author of a book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Think about that title for a moment. The rise -- and fall -- of American growth. So Gordon's view may be as dark as all those presidential candidates' views. But while politicians generally look for easy villains -- immigrants or China or Wall Street -- Gordon takes a less, shall we say, hysterical view of things. It is a view based on how innovation and inventions affect the economy, especially the inventions of the past few decades.

  GORDON: The Second Industrial Revolution included electricity, the internal combustion engine, chemicals, plastics, running water, the conquest of infectious diseases, the conquest of infant mortality, the development of processed food, the fact that women no longer had to make their clothes at home, but could buy them either in department stores or mail-order catalogs. So all of those things, every dimension of human life, was affected by the Second Industrial Revolution, with the inventions mainly taking place between 1870 and the early 1900s, and having their big impact on such economic measures as productivity during the middle part of the 20th century, especially from 1920 to 1970.

  GORDON: The Third Industrial Revolution started off around 1960, with the first mainframe computer. And went further into the mini computer, the personal computer in 1980, and then followed by the marriage of communications with computers that we call the Internet, or the dot-com revolution that happened in the late 1990s. So all of these changes radically changed our ability to process information. Along the way we had a similar revolution in entertainment. So the Third Industrial Revolution includes entertainment, information through the computers, and communication as we moved from landline phones to what we can call dumb mobile phones in the 1990s, then into smart mobile phones in the last 10 to 15 years. Now, there's nothing wrong with the Third Industrial Revolution. Each of those fields was dramatically and completely changed, particularly the information processing by the computer and the invention of such things as e-commerce and search engines and email and web browsing. But those inventions, as monumental as they were, were taking place just in a narrow slice of human life in terms of the economy.

• The paradox of the climate change consensus

  Judith Curry

  There is genuine scientific consensus on the following points:
  • global temperatures have increased overall since 1880
  • humans are contributing to a rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations
  • CO2 emits and absorbs infrared radiation
  For the most consequential issues, there remains considerable debate:
  • whether the warming since 1950 has been dominated by human causes
  • how much the planet will warm in the 21st century
  • whether warming is 'dangerous'
  • whether radically reducing CO2 emissions will improve the climate and human well being

  Leveraged by the consensus on the three points above that are not disputed, the climate 'consensus' is being sold as applying to all of the above, even the issues for which there remains considerable debate.

• CO2 Fertilization Greening The Earth

  "We were able to tie the greening largely to the fertilizing effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration by tasking several computer models to mimic plant growth observed in the satellite data," says co-author Prof. Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University, USA.

  ...
  The beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilization in promoting plant growth has been used by contrarians ...
  "The fallacy of the contrarian argument is two-fold. First, the many negative aspects of climate change, namely global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice, more severe tropical storms, etc. are not acknowledged. Second, studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time,"

• The myth of Big Pharma vaccine profits -- updated

  I previously blogged about this several months ago on October 30, 2015.

  An interesting point:

  Outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics would soon occur within the first 1-2 years after we end vaccination. Based on information developed by the CDC and others, the total worldwide economic burden if we suddenly ended vaccines would exceed US$50 billion (and this ignores flu pandemics that might suddenly ravish the pediatric population).
  
  If we stick with the estimate that about 40% of the cost of hospitalizations will fall to Big Pharma, then they would make about $20 billion a year, worldwide, from not vaccinating. But remember, most vaccines are given, at most, 2-3 times, so, long-term, the revenues derived from vaccines is rather flat, unless new diseases are prevented. But, the revenues from the diseases themselves repeat every single year, and possibly multiple times per child.
  
  And most of the products used to treat these diseases don't require the research and capital investment that vaccines require. In other words, the income derived from vaccine preventable diseases would be more profitable than vaccines.

• All Prior Art

  Algorithmically generated prior art

  All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero -- which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art.

  A sister website All The Claims is attempting the same thing, but with the use of claims and a more verbose alternative.

  Article about it in New Scientist: Computer generates all possible ideas to beat patent trolls

• 2016: the year the podcast came of age

  The Economist

  Podcasts, series of digital audio files that users can download or stream from MP3 players and computers, were first created in 2001. This was also the year that Apple launched the iPod, the device from which podcasting takes its name. Although it is now, in tech terms, a doughty 15 years old, it has developed only fitfully.
  ...
  They are also becoming more popular with advertisers. Podcasts are largely listened to by commuters in cars-a captive audience, and a demographic advertisers are keen to reach. To add to the attraction, the hosts of many podcasts read out the advertising copy themselves, making ads less obtrusive and more persuasive than those on many traditional stations that are more clearly delineated by distinct voices and jingles.

• A Question of Privilege

  Marti Leimbach

  Nonetheless, this whole notion of "privilege" vexes me. We talk about it as though we can all recognise what it is. I am not always so sure. I can tell one narrative of my life and it seems to describe someone who grew up without privilege, and I can tell another narrative and it seems almost as though my life was one of ease and privilege from the time I was born.

• The Case Against Low-fat Milk Is Stronger Than Ever

  Together, the body of data is beginning to reveal both that full-fat dairy has a place in a healthy diet, and also how focusing on one nutrient in the diet may backfire. When dietary guidelines began urging people to lower the amount of fat they ate, the idea was to reduce the amount of cholesterol and unhealthy fats in the body. But by focusing just on cutting out fat, experts didn't count on the fact that people would compensate for the missing fat and start loading up on carbohydrates, which the body converts into sugar-and then body fat.

• [...] is a toy

  As many have recognized, when inventions and innovations first appear they are often (always) labeled as "toys" or "incapable" of doing "real work" or providing "real entertainment". Of course, many new inventions don't work out the way inventors had hoped, though quite frequently it is just a matter of timing and the coming together of a variety of circumstances. It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing.

I blogged about the original research report, First results from psychology's largest reproducibility test in Problems with Science May 2015. Here are some rebuttal links and a rebuttal to the rebuttal. It seems the issue of reproducibility is still unsettled.

• Who Says Most Psychology Studies Can't Be Replicated?

  Pacific Standard magazine, Mar 3, 2016.

  A high-profile paper left that impression last year. Now, Harvard University researchers are offering a detailed rebuttal.
  ...
  A group of researchers led by prominent Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert has published a detailed rebuttal of the 2015 paper. It points to three statistical errors that, in their analysis, led the original authors to an unwarranted conclusion.
  
  In their rebuttal to the rebuttal, Nosek and his colleagues agree that "both methodological differences between original and replication studies and statistical power affect reproducibility," but add that the Gilbert team's "very optimistic assessment is based on statistical misconceptions and selective interpretation of correlational data."
  ...
  "More generally," Nosek and his colleagues add, "there is no such thing as exact replication." As they see it, their paper "provides initial, not definitive, evidence--just like the original studies it replicated."

• Psychologists Call Out the Study That Called Out the Field of Psychology

  Slate blog, Mar 3 2016.

  Yeah, I know, 39 percent sounds really low--but it's about what social scientists should expect, given the fact that errors could occur either in the original studies or the replicas, says King.
  ...
  Some of the methods used for the reproduced studies were utterly confounding--for instance, OSC researchers tried to reproduce an American study that dealt with Stanford University students' attitudes toward affirmative action policies by using Dutch students at the University of Amsterdam. Others simply didn't use enough subjects to be reliable.

• Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science

  The original article in Science from Open Science Collaboration.

  Reproducibility is a defining feature of science, but the extent to which it characterizes current research is unknown. We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available. Replication effects were half the magnitude of original effects, representing a substantial decline. Ninety-seven percent of original studies had statistically significant results. Thirty-six percent of replications had statistically significant results; 47% of original effect sizes were in the 95% confidence interval of the replication effect size; 39% of effects were subjectively rated to have replicated the original result; and if no bias in original results is assumed, combining original and replication results left 68% with statistically significant effects. Correlational tests suggest that replication success was better predicted by the strength of original evidence than by characteristics of the original and replication teams.

• Comment on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science"

  The original rebuttal in Science.

  A paper from the Open Science Collaboration ( Research Articles, 28 August 2015, aac4716) attempting to replicate 100 published studies suggests that the reproducibility of psychological science is surprisingly low. We show that this article contains three statistical errors and provides no support for such a conclusion. Indeed, the data are consistent with the opposite conclusion, namely, that the reproducibility of psychological science is quite high.

• Response to Comment on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science"

  The rebuttal to the rebuttal in Science.

  Gilbert et al. conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration's Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted.