In the Soviet Union of the 1970s and early 1980s, there was feeling of utter listlessness and apathy amongst the youth. The authoritarian system seemed well-entrenched, decaying yet tenacious. In those years, the quality of art and literature out of the Russian empire dropped precipitously. Other than a lone Solzhenitsyn, it appeared that there was little creativity about. Even the music was derivative and tired. People retreated more and more into themselves.
Hooman Majd, in his The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, published a little before the electoral events of last year, described a similar apathy amongst the youth of Iran. As long as they could practise their freedoms in the privacy of their homes, they didn't want to rock the boat, demand external liberties, engage in street protests. On the other side, the ruling cliques and their foot-soldiers became a bit more lax in punishing violations of the decency codes. A mutual detente, for all intents and purposes eternal, descended upon the land. There would be no immediate revolt, quoth Mr Majd.
It is a different matter that he was very shortly thereafter proven wrong in this assessment (in fact, he has quickly come up with a sequel - which I haven't read yet - which probably updates his argument).
But before you think to yourself that such ennui only descends upon totalitarian regimes, I'll urge you to read the absolutely superb Berlin Blues by Sven Regener. It is set in the West Berlin of the 1980s, in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Wall. West Berlin, you may recall, was an outpost of freedom surrounded on all sides by the Communist East, an embrace that caused many residents to feel an unconscious suffocation. Not our protagonist, though, who has turned thirty (or will shortly do so), and who expects nothing more from life than to continue to be a bartender, to read books, and to live life without too many expectations. In this, he is no different from his large circle of friends and acquaintances, all of whom stagger through their daily lives with all the insight of a dormouse. This is a funny and affectionate portrayal of a time of stagnation in the West shortly before 1989 when the collapse of Communism suddenly revitalised the people of Europe.
I was far too young in the 70s to experience any of this soul-sucking anomie; in the 80s, it was all high hair and Michael Jackson. Reading about the lives of people only a few years older than I am now brings fresh insight into events that shaped their characters. Sadly it appears that both freedom and the lack of it serve eventually to stifle the lives of the bright and sparky.
One autumn, a young woman arrived in IISc from Calcutta, and handed out questionnaires to various unsuspecting students she found lazing about the campus. It consisted of rather detailed queries on the respondent's mental health, all couched in rather bland prose, and suggesting multiple-choice answers. I was one of the unsuspecting students, and - as the young woman was rather pretty - was among the earliest to hand in my answers.
Pleased with my alacrity, she told me she was investigating the incidence of suicide in the more cut-throat academic institutions in the country.
"Whoa!" I said. "Suicide? You didn't say anything about suicide."
"Well, naturally," she said, impatiently. "You understand I didn't want to bias your responses."
As she was rather pretty, I overlooked this jibe. And I sat hopefully at the same table as her in the mess hall for the next few nights. She ignored me for the most part, except to hand back the questionnaire after she was done with it.
"You'll be glad to know you don't show any suicidal tendencies," she said.
"And you know that how?" I said, huffily.
"These first few questions are designed to detect those with depressive or self-destructive thoughts," she said.
"Well, that's good to know," I said. "Can you pass me the sambar?"
"But you are prone to stress," she continued. She didn't pass me the sambar.
"Eh, what?" I said. "How?"
"You sleep a lot as exams approach. That's a classic sign of stress. Some people get insomnia. Others don't get out of bed."
"Well," I said. "Now that you know me so well, how about we go for this concert?"
Her eyes glazed over, and she turned away, and I didn't see her again.
Still, her analysis turned out to be both topical and trenchant. During my four years on campus, at least 3 or 4 people committed suicide every year; this in a population of fewer than a thousand students.
In his book, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, Leonard Mlodinow talks about the stress of being in Caltech, the university with the highest suicide rate in the US. IISc and the IITs are not that different. Academic pressure is a terrible thing, particularly among the brighter and more ambitious scholars. If it is not the intense competition among them, it is the stress of finding oneself caught short, or the severe insecurity that stems from fear of exposure as a fraud, or as someone who has no right to be in that academic setting. Mlodinow himself had received a fellowship to Caltech that allowed him to do whatever he wanted, and he found himself petrified with fear. He could think of nothing he wanted to investigate. He thought he'd be exposed as an impostor. Were it not for the coincidence of Richard Feynman in the office next door to him who ended up mentoring him not only in science but also in an attitude to life, Mlodinow might have burned out, or collapsed, or quit, or, worst of all, killed himself.
Fortunately for me, I was more self-satisfied than ambitious, unlike those unfortunates who took their lives. The sleep restored me from the stress, and I somehow passed the exams. But that Bengali girl's diagnosis has stayed with me. To this day, when I am under some pressure or the other, I begin to feel horribly drowsy. You'd think that knowing the cause of the drowsiness would help to mitigate it. Not on your life.
This summer, as I said, I'm busy swotting away for the IMC. And I am feeling somnolent all the time. Until Friday the 13th, therefore, you'll only hear snoring noises coming from this part of town. So keep your voices down, people.
Welcome to the twenty-fourth instalment of the Giant’s Shoulders, the monthly carnival of science and history-of-science blogging from around the planet. In this issue, there’s a bit of a preponderance of historical vignettes, which I trust you’ll find interesting.
Shall we start with a timeline of scientific discoveries, analyses and inventions? How about this – from years that end in 24 in every century? I’m missing several years, so if you’d like to fill those in, please be my guest.
I can’t think of any particular grouping in this carnival. You know, by subject and all that. It’s pretty motley. Chronological order is somewhat unsatisfying, like arranging books on your shelf in alphabetical order of title. Let us, therefore, be whimsical.
From New at LacusCurtius & Livius, we have Bill Thayer’s introduction and a link to a classic paper about how people developed effective ways to compute the heights of mountains. It’s a wide-ranging work, starting from the Ancient Greeks and working its way through Kepler and The paper is from 1929, so expect nothing on GPS in it!
Continuing with mensuration, Ethan Siegel at ScienceBlogs has a neat little piece about how to determine distances to the stars. In How Far to the Stars, he explains the principle of parallax, notes that Copernicus thought he could use it to tell distances, and then goes on to Christiaan Huygens’s idea of using luminosity to compute how far Sirius is from us.
So we are able to measure distances with excellent accuracy. But what of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Surely it’s impossible to measure simultaneously (to arbitrary precision) both the position and the momentum of an object? This is certainly true on the scale of the truly small, but why is it not so evident on the scale of our senses? Why does quantum mechanics explain to remarkable accuracy the weird behaviour of the minute but loses that weirdness at the macroscopic? On homunculus, Philip Ball presents Big Quantum, where he talks about this explanatory lacuna in the transition between the very small and the large. It’s all due to decoherence!
For another example of the genre, we have Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor with an interesting little piece about one type of alternative medicine – uroscopy. This is the use of urine’s colour, consistency, taste and smell as a diagnostic tool. By the 19th century, professional medics had discounted this as quackery, but common people continued to frequent piss-doctors. In Cameron the Piss-Prophet, we learn how one such worthy was hoist by his own petard.
From one aspect of quackery, we move on to another. In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft (or Tofts) was a sensation in England for having allegedly given birth to rabbits.
She had supporters and deriders in equal measure; scientists argued both in her favour (e.g. a medical doctor, John Maubray) and against (Sir Richard Manningham, a male midwife). William Hogarth’s Cunicularii at the Wellcome Library Item of the Month (besides analysing some lovely etchings by the great artist) raises a subtle question.
Leaving quackery, we ponder another form of obfuscation. Via Thony C. we have an article titled “Follies of the present day”: Scriptural Geology from 1817 to 1857 by J.M. Lynch at A Simple Prop. Who were scriptural geologists? These were scientists who tried somehow to unify vast geological time with their faith in the Bible’s six days of creation. Note that these people did not believe (pace Ussher) that the Universe was formed in 4004 BC.
Why did these Christian scientists not pay closer attention to James Hutton? In 1785, he had published an article Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability in which he began the study of deep geological time. Via Thony C., we have John F. Ptak’s Raising Greatness: James Hutton’s Deep View of Time, 1795 posted at Ptak Science Books talking about Hutton’s remarkable intuition, as he saw the entirety of Earth’s history explained in the sloping red sandstone at Siccar Point.
While on the subject of deep time, a fossil of the Archaeopteryx was first discovered in 1861. Since then palaeontologists have argued whether this transitional creature (between dinosaurs and true birds) was capable of flight. Ed Yong presents First Birds Were Poor Fliers at the Discover Magazine Blog. There were some reasons to believe that the beast could fly but also good reasons why not.
Dorset Ancestors have a biography of Francis Glisson, a native of that English county, who went on to great success as a doctor in 17th century London. When he heard of a new debilitating disease among children of Dorset, he studied it carefully and concluded that this bone-deformative condition (which we know as ‘rickets’) was caused by malnutrition.
A sesquicentennial after Glisson plied his investigative mind, another Englishman began to consider the various causes of deafness in people. As a diagnostic tool, John Harrison Curtis invented the Cephaloscope, which is described in Jaipreet Virdi’s post The Cephaloscope on From the Hands of Quacks.
John Harrison Curtis also insisted that aurists – students of auditory illnesses – should also be attached to medical hospitals. Jaipreet Virdi’s related post The London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb tells this story.
From illnesses of the body, we segue to a illness of the mind. The dreaded African disease, sleeping sickness, when in an advanced stage, often resulted in violent mania. Was this true insanity on the part of the natives, or just a manifestation of a fear of isolation in a camp? From Sleeping Sickness and Lunacy at the Colonial Psychiatry Hub, we learn that much documentation of the effects of sleeping sickness on the local population is available from the British staffers of the Colonial Office (Uganda).
This video is an overview of the life, times, and accomplishments of Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the Dutch scientist who used hand-made single-lens microscopes to become the first human to see protozoa, bacteria, sperm, and red blood cells, among many other things.
And although that video’s only 7 minutes long, it promises more riches to come. Can there be any more to van Leeuwenhoek, then? Indeed there can, and Thony C. presents Lego-nhoek? posted at Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal.
van Leeuwenhoek, of course, was a contemporary, competitor and Royal Society colleague of that polymath Robert Hooke. I found several blogs on this brilliant Englishman, and planned to chuck them in here, but closer scrutiny revealed that at least one of those pieces was a copy of a Wikipedia article. I hope this is not a similar copy: Leland Velazquez discusses the Physics of Bungee Jumping. Hooke’s work on elasticity leading to his eponymous law is the underpinning of this extreme sport.
If Robert Hooke is around, Christopher Wren can’t be far behind. Another brilliantly multifaceted man, Wren involved himself in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, art, and – we learn from Christopher Wren and the Bees by Gene Kritsky at Wonders & Marvels – beekeeping. Why is this scientifically relevant? He also developed the transparent beehive that was suitable for the scientific observation of bee behaviour.
The bees were able to move between the various layers of the hive, and glass panels set into the structure allowed an observer to see the honey cascading down inside it. Although Wren’s construction had not been an immediate success (due to a failure to realise that bees worked downwards), it offered the prospect of an ever-increasing stock of bees and honey within the same hive. [from here]
Speaking of polymaths, there was Florence Fenwick Miller in the 19th century. She was a suffragette, a journalist, an educator, and a qualified medical doctor. From Peacay at the absolutely ravishing BibliOdyssey, we have An Atlas of Anatomy.
From Peacay at BibliOdyssey again, we have Fungis Danicis, a lovely set of illustrations of fungi studied by a Danish lawyer-turned-botanist named Theodor Holmskjold in the 18th century. This worthy actually identified over fifty new species during two years of observation in the countryside near Aarhus.
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Now for some controversy! When scientists without training in history try to develop works in the history of science, clearly feathers are ruffled. Via Thony C., we have Renaissance Art or Neuroanatomy? Part 1 and part 2, posted by Darin at PACHSmörgåsbord. It appears that there have been a series of papers over the past 20 years by various scientists trying to find hidden anatomically precise messages in Michelangelo’s art.
R. Donald Fields wrote up a guest blog at Scientific American recently that discusses the oeuvre; as it turns out, none of the scientists involved is a trained historian. As the rebuttal at PACHSmörgåsbord makes clear, this is dangerous practice:
Why does this matter? Because such articles attract the attention of editors and contributors at places like Scientific American. These contributors then post a redaction of the article on the website, where the post becomes one of the most popular. Such redactions misrepresent the history of science, suggest that anybody can write the history of science, and deny that historians of science have a discrete expertise. That’s why it matters.
But just to show that not all scientific speculation on art is ill-founded, check out this interesting bit of detective work by a bunch of astronomers at Texas State University. Via Thony C., we have a post by Roger Sinnott on Sky And Telescope titled Walt Whitman’s Meteor-Procession, we learn about the great poet’s imagery (“the strange huge meteor-procession" that went "shooting over our heads" with "its balls of unearthly light”) and an interesting astronomical phenomenon.
I’m not sure if this next piece fits within the purview of our Carnival (as it may be more aligned to sociology) but I think it relates to a seminal work of behavioural psychology, so perhaps I can present it? Christopher Greene’s Clarks’ Black-White Doll Experiment Replicated at Advances in the History of Psychology blog discusses an even more controversial subject than that in the preceding paragraph, and highlights its most recent replication under the aegis of CNN (full report here in PDF).
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On to more jolly subjects. Remember Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation? It is 50 years since the invention of the (optical) laser. Via Thony C., we have Happy Birthday! posted by Matt Springer at Built on Facts.
Another anniversary is that of Vannevar Bush’s visionary piece sixty-five years ago in the Atlantic Review about associative links in information, which one can easily see as an early precursor to hypertext and all that. Via gg, we have Simon Harper’s review ‘As We May Think’ at 65 from his blog Thinking Out Loud.
We end on a luminous, numinous note. What links a certain 1980s teen film, a song by John Parr, the Chinese sea-goddess Mazu, and – wait for it – ionised air? In St Elmo’s Fire, Captain Skellet of A Schooner of Science explains the whys and the hows of the gorgeous blue glow that appears on the tips of masts on sailing ships.
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[And there you have it. Thanks for stopping by. I hope this encourages you to write up your own pieces on science and its history and philosophy. Do consider submitting your blog article to the next edition of the giant's shoulders at The Dispersal of Darwin. You can use the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.]
It’s a terrible thing being a cynic. A dose of realism might serve to check otiose imaginings in people. There might even be humour in a drily understated dismissal of overconfidence. But cynicism drains enthusiasm, fills people with jadedness, never allows for improvement. So what is it about team-building exercises that makes them so susceptible to cynical attack?
I attended one such session once. It started off with a self-evaluation of all attendees under the Myers-Briggs methodology. Those who know this psychometric evaluation will recognise the axes – the four dimensions on which one is scored. These are an axis from Introvert (I) to Extravert (E), another from Sensing (S) to Intuition (N), a third from Thinking (T) to Feeling (F), and a last one from Judgment (J) to Perception (P). Most financial investment types appear to fall within the NTP or STP, with roughly equal numbers among Introverts and Extraverts. The consultants who conducted the workshop repeated several times that these were not deficiencies or drawbacks, and were merely aimed at informing the attendees that there were colleagues who scored differently, and therefore thought differently, and appreciation of this would enable them to work better with each other. There are, they said, the rare F types who needed to be nurtured, for they would be the ones who be the social glue that kept the company going.
Which is all very well. Except that there’s been considerable criticism of the Myers-Briggs methodology. And anyway, the way people score depends upon their own state of mind, their moods on the day, the weather, their levels of impatience with answering sixty-odd questions. It’s very like wine-tasting in its margin for error.
It got a bit more bizarre later. A stand-up comic improvisational artist was brought on stage to teach us how to relax and think on our feet and lose our inhibitions and, well, improvise. It has to be said that despite considerable encouragement and advice, a very few people came up on stage – and, it turned out after a while, the same people over and over again with the occasional exception. So what did this achieve? We learned the three-line improvisation. We learned that we should ‘listen’, ‘say yes’ and ‘commit.’ Somehow that translated to our workplace as well, we were told. We had fun.
I wonder how many people would remember any of this in a month. How many would recall the Myers-Briggs classification of their teammates? How often would they feel the urge to nurture the F type, even if they found one? Will they ever improvise whilst in client meetings? In our industry we need to be very careful and honest about what we say to clients. Thinking on one’s feet, I suspect, would be a bit counter to that.
The other day, a colleague and I transferred from the Underground to the commuter service at Waterloo. At least, I did; he found his electronic ticket short of funds, and had to go off to recharge it before going through the turnstiles.
"Which platform are you going to be on?" he said.
"I don't know," I said. "Platform 3?"
"Okay," he said, and went off to put some money in his ticket.
I walked up the stairs to Platform 3, and stood waiting. I pulled out a book out of my bag and began to read it.
Presently, a train arrived and streams of passengers alighted and boarded. I kept reading.
Then I heard the beep-beep-beep warning of the doors closing, and without thinking, jumped into the compartment nearest to me.
The doors shut. I felt silly. The train pulled away from the station.
Minutes later, my mobile rang.
"Which platform are you on?" said my colleague.
"Er," I said. "I was on platform 3, but now I'm on the train."
"Ah," he said.
I continued to feel silly for the rest of the journey. What was it about that beep-beep-beep that prompted me to jump into the train?
I blame Pavlov. I'm no different from a slavering dog, it appears. Everyday as I commute I hear the beep, and invariably I jump into the nearest compartment. Evidently, I have no control over my legs.
Well, what do you know? According to a study done by a couple of European academics, finance professionals are not as good as undergraduate students at forecasting exchange rates over the ensuing period. While other professionals are generally better than Joe Public at predicting features of their domains of expertise (e.g. meteorologists generally get the weather right more often than the hoi polloi), it turns out that financiers have biases that mess up their abilities to forecast foreign exchange levels accurately.
Here's the abstract of the paper:
Professional forecasters in foreign exchange markets are not able to beat naive forecasts. In order to find reasons for this phenomenon we compare the empirical forecasts of experts with the experimentally generated forecasts of novices of the EUR/USD exchange rate in three different forecast horizons. Although the subjects are only provided with the realizations of the exchange rate and are not supported by any statistical procedures they outperform experts in accuracy. Professionals consistently expect a reversal of foregoing exchange rate changes whereas novices extrapolate trends. The judgemental forecasts appear to be unbiased and professionals appear to be biased. We demonstrate that professionals are influenced by the fundamental value - an irrelevant anchor in speculative exchange markets. The poor performance of the experts is not a common failure of human decision-making in market environments but caused by misleading information.
This should be dispiriting to those of us who work in the business. Why is it that a bunch of students who have no clue about the way foreign exchange markets behave outperform a bunch of highly-paid City types?
The reason appears to be two-fold. City economists have a cognitive bias - they 'know' that currencies tend to revert to a level given by what is called purchasing power parity. They, therefore, tend to predict a fall in a given exchange rate if they think it is above that parity level, or a rise if it is below. The students, on the other hand, merely project the visual trend they observe given the recent performance of the currency. Because there are brief periods of trending behaviour among currencies (although overall they tend to follow a random walk), the students get their predictions right more often than the professionals.
The other reason is that City professionals set much store by all the masses of data they encounter on their Bloomberg or Reuters terminals, and subconsciously assume that this gives them some sort of inside view into the markets. Unfortunately, over the periods they are asked to forecast - one to six months, say - the most recent exciting news (which usually has the greatest effect on their thinking) usually has little bearing.
The study can be criticised in a number of ways, though. Whereas the researchers recruited their pool of students, they didn't do so with the professionals. Instead, they used a consensus forecast as provided by some third party. The consensus forecast, in our experience, has little practical relevance. What is generally more informative is the spread in the forecast - how far apart are the individual forecasts? - or how many economists predict a level higher than the median as opposed to how many predict a level lower than the median. Also, it is true that these economists are rarely brought to task with respect to the accuracy of their forecasts. After all, no money is invested based on them. The ones who are tasked with making money are portfolio managers and the like. They are not really interested in forecasts of exchange rate levels - what is more important to them is the accuracy of the direction in which the exchange rate is likely to move.
A colleague recently conducted a brief study into the long-term dynamics of currency rates. He found that at any given time, a third of the exchange rates under consideration tend to be utterly random. He joked that we might as well stay at home a third of the time. But of course the problem is that we don't know which of these currencies will stop behaving randomly in the next period (a week or a month or a quarter). If we did, we could invest in those rates and listen to the 'kaching, kaching' noises as the profits poured in.
It is this constantly changing behaviour of currencies that makes them so difficult to model. All we can strive to do is to capture the brief periods of inefficiency and hope they last long enough to be monetised. It's all good fun.
- J. Leitner, R. Schmidt, "A systematic comparison of professional exchange rate forecasts with the judgmental forecasts of novices."
Via Language Log, news of a brand new method to waste time: psychoanalyse your blog via Typalyzer. In the words of Language Log, here is how the website works:
The Typalyzer seems to use a standard machine classification technique. Presumably the creators have created a little database consisting of example websites with classifications that they think are appropriate, then trained the classifier with these examples. Now the classifier gives instant classifications of sites it's never seen before based, broadly, on how similar the new sites are to the old ones. It's likely that the classifier is primarily using what's called a "bag of words" technique. That is, similarity of one site to another is based on the relative frequencies of words used on the sites. Then based on the classification, the machine chooses which misleading picture to take from a vast database of misleading pictures. All well and good. If you've any faith at all in the psychological categories they use, then this is neat way to do cheap psychology.
As I'm rather at loose end this cold, cold morning, what better way to warm up than to test a few blogs for their psycho-profile?
Singaporean in London: Doer! Especially attuned to people and things. Talks, jokes and engages in physical outdoor activities. Happiest with action-filled work. Impulsive. Has problem sitting still.
Spaniard in the Works: Performer! Entertaining and friendly type. Attuned to pleasure and beauty, and fills surroundings with soft fabrics and sweet smells. Lives in the now, doesn't plan ahead, and risks exhaustion. Enjoys work that helps others in concrete and visible ways. Rarely initiates confrontation, a quality that makes a management position rather difficult.
Language Log: Scientist! Long-range thinker and individualist. Good at improving almost anything with creativity and imagination. Intellectually curious and pshysically (psychically? physically?) hesitant to try new things. Has no trouble working alone and, owing to abstract thinking, finds it hard to communicate his vision effectively to others.
Yossarian Lives: Artist! Gentle and compassionate type. Attuned to inner values and what other people need. Tends to follow the path of least resistance. Works quietly. Values friends and family above work.
Polandian: Visionary! Charming and trend savvy type. Especially attuned to big picture. Has sophisticated language skills, and is witty and social. Pragmatic decision maker. Gets easily bored when the creative exciting start-up phase of a project is over.
La Vie Quotidienne: Mechanic! Independent and problem-solving type. Attuned to demands of the moment. Prefers to think things out personally and avoid interpersonal conflicts. Works with other mechanics. Enjoys risk: drives racing cars and works as a policeman.
Jabberwock: Thinker! Logical-and-analytical type. Attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges. Figures out subtle connections between things and imagines far-reaching implications. Works with complex things using imaginative models of reality. Not good at understanding the needs of others, so comes across as arrogant and impatient to people slow to understand what is being explained.
I have modestly given myself the name of the greatest of the Eldar: Fëanor, the maker of the Silmarils and the creator of the Tengwar. He was a Master of many things. I am merely a Jack.
