Here are the "official" video links from the Festival della Scienza in Genova: my public lecture , interview.I had a wonderful time in Genova. My visit wasn't very long, because I had to come back to teach.On the trip I spoke to quite a few young Italians (young here is probably, err, 35 and below), who all expressed pessimism about the future of the country and the economy. On the other hand, at the fancy dinners with Genovese families, I met a number of wealthy business types who reassured me that Italy would be fine and would have no trouble...
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Walter Isaacson, biographer of both Einstein and Steve Jobs, on smarts, intuition and innovation.NYTimes: ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into...
Friday, 28 October 2011
Notice anything funny about the trends? Source: tax data (complete tables at the link; what I display below is truncated). Click for larger versions.Here is the share of national income by profession.More interesting would be the top .1 percent, because secular growth in financier representation would be even more apparent.Here are two more just for f...
Monday, 24 October 2011
Daniel Kahneman claims that differences in the performance of professional investors are mostly due to luck, whereas compensation is awarded as if differences are due to skill. Most alpha is fake alpha. This of course raises all sorts of questions about why such people are allowed to become so extravagantly wealthy. The usual argument is that their investment decisions lead to more efficient resource allocation in the economy. (They are a "necessary...
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Video of my public lecture and an interview, both available in English or Italian translation. The slides for my talk are here.Some more photos below. An interview with Rai (Italian version of BBC). Matt Ridley (author and science writer) was also interviewed (the woman sitting between us is the translator).More views of Geno...
The lecture hall. See here for video and a short interview. (Not up at the moment but should appear later today.)Translator booth. Most people listened via headset.The interview studio.Plaza outside the Palazzo Ducale.At the pier.View from the hills. Each night the speakers have been invited to dinners hosted by local Genovese families "of repute" :-) Last night's dinner was one of the best meals I can rememb...
Saturday, 22 October 2011
Friday, 21 October 2011
This paper got a lot of attention in the press. I don't have time to discuss it in detail, but it is worth emphasizing that the correlation between scores on WISC and WAIS for the n=33 subjects was around .8 -- typical for two different IQ tests administered years apart. (Note, the same test -- e.g., the SAT -- administered twice with a gap of 1 year might have correlation of .9 or even .95.) In other words, knowing an individual's WISC score gives you good power to predict their eventual WAIS score, but with a big chunk of variance (say, 30-40%...
There's an interesting discussion of height and selection at Razib's blog Gene Expression. I can think of lots of plausible tradeoffs related to greater height -- increased calorie requirements, perhaps not so adaptive for females, effects on metabolism or other body systems, etc. But what about facial attractiveness or symmetry? Every so often I see a really good looking face and the effect is very striking. Surely there are lots of benefits from this, but are there any plausible genetic costs? I would guess that evolution can tweak facial bone...
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
As someone who never mastered them, I've always felt oppressed by Chinese characters. Perhaps my kids will succeed where I failed :-)Bertrand Russell reflects on ideograms, alphabets and civilizations in The Problem of China. (Note, technically Chinese is neither wholly ideographic or logographic.) As everyone knows, the Chinese do not have letters, as we do, but symbols for whole words. This has, of course, many inconveniences: it means that, in...
Monday, 17 October 2011
When I see someone overcoming their long-held prior beliefs, I pay attention. Someone who sided with Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s doesn't have to be a supporter of financiers in 2011.Note to rabid conservative attack dogs: criticism of the present over-concentration of economic and political power is not equivalent to the rejection of a (well-functioning) free market system.I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be rightIt has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must:...
New Yorker economics correspondent John Cassidy blogs:TOP TEN UNLIKELY OCCUPY WALL STREET SUPPORTERS(click through for links to the source of each quote)10) Henry Blodget: Disgraced Wall Street analyst turned online media mogul empathizes with the mob. Provides handy charts to back up case.9) Suze Orman: Schoolmarmish personal-finance maven says banks deserve to be criticized. Grades OWS as “approved.”8) Deepak Chopra: New Age guru leads protesters in a group meditation. Tells them to go to place of “compassion, centered equanimity, and creativity.”7)...
Friday, 14 October 2011
New Yorker: in search of bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.BBC In Our Time: the Ming voyages.Financial Times: "The reputation of economists, never high, has been a casualty of the global crisis ..." See also here.Steve Weinberg on his work as a JASONBusinessInsider: 15 charts on US wealth and income inequality (the ugly truth).NYTimes: "... participants judged women made up in varying intensities of luminance contrast (fancy words for how much eyes...
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Next week I'll give a "Lectio Magistralis" (not sure exactly what this means, but probably I am not worthy ;-) at the Genova Science Festival.Below are the title and abstract. Slightly imperfect Google translation.Unificare le forze e le idee: La sorprendente semplicità della naturaIl mondo che ci circonda è straordinariamente complesso, abbondante, complicato. È affascinante scoprire come la complessità della natura possa essere spiegata in termini...
In a Harvard Square cafe with a famous theoretical physicist. Small talk after discussing some research. I am in my mid twenties, my counterpart is an older professor.What do you think happens to those child prodigies?Weren't you a child prodigy?No, the real ones. Kid geniuses who finish college at age 12. There's always one in the paper.I don't think any eighteen year old in the world understands quantum mechanics as well as I ...
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Sunday, 9 October 2011
I was a bit busy last week, with a visitor, posting a paper, etc. so I didn't get to comment on the Nobel prizes.The dark energy prize is richly deserved (see slides from a colloquium on dark energy I've given a few times; includes above figure). These guys have discovered where most of the energy in the universe is, and may have determined the ultimate fate of the universe on cosmological scales. I note Saul Perlmutter was awarded 1/2 the prize...
Thursday, 6 October 2011
I actually spent more time at Harvard than at Caltech, and the former paid me generously to be there while the latter charged me tuition. But I still root for the geeky underdog :-)My Caltech graduating class was 186 kids. How many schools that size can compete with Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley or Cambridge in anything?A reasonable university ranking metric should have components that are normalized to size. For example, the number of citations or publications or research dollars per professor (or per student) is more informative than the absolute...
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in...
These researchers find evidence that genes lowering the age at first reproduction (AFR) became more prevalent over 140 years in a small isolated population for which they had detailed ancestry records. See also this NYTimes article.I haven't read the paper yet, so can't comment on the result. Environmental confounds might be tricky, but I suppose the result is basically that children of low AFR mothers tend to also have low AFR and that AFR dropped systematically in the population due to greater fitness (effective fertility) of low AFR women over...
How the US lost much of its manufacturing capability, step by step. Each business decision along the way may have been rational for the individual company making it, but the cumulative effect has been a hollowing out of US technological capabilities.Forbes: ... The U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the U.S., even if Amazon wanted to:The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.The electrophoretic...
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
New paper! This is a brief writeup of the talk I gave last year in Benasque, as well as a few other places. Slides are available at the link above.On the origin of probability in quantum mechanicshttp://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0549I give a brief introduction to many worlds or "no wavefunction collapse" quantum mechanics, suitable for non-specialists. I then discuss the origin of probability in such formulations, distinguishing between objective and subjective notions of probability.Here's what I say in the conclusion.Decoherence does not resolve the...
Monday, 3 October 2011
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Highlights of a special FT debate looking at the choices that lie ahead for the world’s second largest economy: video. [Related statistic: Chinese internet users now exceed 500 million, greater than the entire population of the EU.]Forensic Asia's Gillem Tulloch believes that the Chinese property market is a bubble on a similar magnitude to the crisis in the US as a result of the huge stimulus package after the global financial crisis. He tells the FT why he thinks China could be on the verge of a property-led slump that would have an impact far...
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