Wired talks about how Google Scholar is changing the academic publishing industry as open science starts to take hold, and how Microsoft Academic might be an even better search engine. There are also a lot of other emerging search engines out there, which the article goes into.
I use Google Scholar quite a bit, even though Google sort of stopped advertising it and makes you go through a couple extra clicks to get to it. I didn’t know Microsoft Academic or most of these other tools existed.
The Economist has a piece on macroeconomic models used to evaluate tax policy.
Lurk near PhD economists online or at conferences, and you will hear them talk about “crisis in macro”. They mean that the models and assumptions most dominant among macroeconomists have failed repeatedly since 2007 to predict or even describe what’s happening. A defence, popular among academics, goes like this: we did get it wrong, but as responsible social scientists, we’re busy and fascinated right now, trying to figure out what was broken and how to fix it. It is a fair defence. In particular young macroeconomists have been using bigger datasets and faster computers to more accurately predict human behaviour. Economists are more likely to accept now, for example, that people with and without access to credit or wealth react differently to the same policy, an idea that is slowly working its way into models at central banks and even at the Joint Committee on Taxation.
This progress is unfortunate for Republicans. In the 1990s social science was on their side. Because data and computing power were harder to come by, macroeconomic models relied on thought experiments. The seminal model showing the ideal capital-gains tax rate as zero, for example, dates to 1986. It assumes that the economy consists of only one person. Also, she is immortal. The Wonder Woman economy, if you will. That model is now interesting only for a lecture on the history of economic thought. We’ve moved on, macroeconomists protest. But economists have. And Republicans haven’t…
But if you are going to insist on modeling the future and then planning around it, you have to do it right. The economists at the Joint Committee on Taxation are thoughtful. They read the most recent research. They examine their own models and, when they can, update them—conservatively. If, as Republicans have been insisting for 20 years, we have to assess our tax policies with dynamic scoring, there is no better way to do it than through the JCT. Unfortunately, as modeling has improved, it has not improved in the direction Republicans prefer, which leaves them where they are now. They wanted social science in policy-making, and they got it, in the form of a $1trn tax bill.
I don’t know how any ethical person can support the Republican party right now. They don’t care about facts, logic, or evidence, and certainly not economic growth or raising the living standards of their constituents. They are blantantly and shamelessly committed to lining the pockets of their big-business funders. It’s corrupt, undemocratic and shameful.
Exercise is good not only for your body but for your brain as you age. Surprisingly, exercising your body may actually be better for your brain than exercising your brain. Well, it is probably a good idea to hedge your bets and do both.
Most frightening stories:
Most hopeful stories:
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
Russian cosmonauts are claiming they have found bacteria on the outside of the International Space Station that have to have come from space. At least, they didn’t get on the ISS until the ISS was in space, meaning they already had to be there. Reading between the lines, that doesn’t mean the bacteria didn’t make their way from Earth to space at some point in the past, before the ISS was launched.
I wonder if harmless bacteria could go into space, mutate into something dangerous, then make their way back to Earth on a returning spacecraft. Has that story ever been done?
But The Andromeda Strain had a lame ending, as I recall.
It’s not just health care costs, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, drug addiction and infrastructure. As more evidence the U.S. is gradually slipping behind the rest of the developed world in many areas, here is a New York Times article on how road deaths are worse here than our peer countries in terms of wealth. And not just western Europe, but again our close cultural and historical cousins like Canada and Australia.
It didn’t used to be this way. A generation ago, driving in the United States was relatively safe. Fatality rates here in 1990 were roughly 10 percent lower than in Canada and Australia, two other affluent nations with a lot of open road.
Over the last few decades, however, other countries have embarked on evidence-based campaigns to reduce vehicle crashes. The United States has not. The fatality rate has still fallen here, thanks partly to safer vehicles, but it’s fallen far less than anywhere else.
As a result, this country has turned into a disturbing outlier. Our vehicle fatality rate is about 40 percent higher than Canada’s or Australia’s. The comparison with Slovenia is embarrassing. In 1990, its death rate was more than five times as high as ours. Today, the Slovenians have safer roads.
Let’s not set our sights too high – could we start by just making America average again? Let’s try to catch up to our peers with similar levels of wealth and technology, instead of continuing to slip further behind. Or we could just bury our heads in the sand, not learn about the world, let our politicians tell us how great we are, and never find out that there could have been a better way.
Some bacteria have been found surviving on the outside of the International Space Station. Tardigrades are an even hardier form of microbe that can supposedly survive even close to absolute zero. They can essentially go dormant in a state very, very near death, then bounce back if and when they find themselves in suitable conditions later on. There is even speculation that life on Earth could have arrived from space in a form like this, and/or life forms originating on Earth could be living on other planets right now.
Space dust collisions as a planetary escape mechanism (In press Astrobiology, 2017)
Hypervelocity space dust is a unique entity in planetary systems like our Solar System, which is able to go past and enter the atmosphere of planets, collect samples of those planets and deposit samples of other planets. The entire system of fast space dust in a planetary system thus contains the atoms, molecules and possibly even microbial life, from all the planets and provides a means to mix them up amongst the different planets. For collecting atoms and molecules that form atmospheres, the mechanism proposed in this paper is fairly straightforward. For collecting life and life related molecules this mechanism has interesting features, but many detailed issues would still need to be studied. The violent collisions involved in this mechanism could make it difficult for life to remain intact. There are several possible collision scenarios that would all need to be explored to get a definitive answer to this problem. But even if life itself does not remain intact, it could still permit the complex molecules associated with life to get propelled into space, and that is also interesting for the panspermia process. Since space dust is ubiquitous all over the Solar System and is believed to exist in interstellar and probably intergalactic space, the mechanism proposed in this paper for propelling small particles into space could provide a universal mechanism both for the exchange of the atomic and molecular constituents between distant planetary atmospheres and for initiating the first step of the panspermia process.
According to Wikipedia, panspermia is “the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets,[1] planetoids,[2] and also by spacecraft in the form of unintended contamination by microorganisms.”
Of course there is still the Fermi Paradox – if life is so common, why haven’t we been able to find any evidence of it, anywhere, even once? There are ethical implications of all this. We would like to perpetuate our human species and current form of civilization, of course, and that means getting into space eventually. But if we don’t manage to pull that off, and all life on Earth is wiped out for one reason or another, panspermia means that life exists elsewhere, and somewhere, sometime, intelligent life will evolve again if it hasn’t already. But if there is absolutely no life anywhere else in the universe, the loss of it on Earth would mean the end of all life forever. That would be too heavy a burden to bear, and would mean we have a strong ethical obligation to get some self-sustaining human colonies out into space as an insurance policy. But there could be a cheaper form of insurance policy – intentionally contaminate space and nearby planets with hardy germs from Earth, and in a few billion years something will survive and evolve, somewhere, into something. Do this enough and again, eventually you will have intelligent life somewhere. But finally, if it turns out there is life on other nearby planets, even very primitive life, then intentionally contaminating them with our germs would not seem like such an ethical thing to do after all.
An article on History News Network has this disturbing quote from Hermann Goering:
The Nazis fundamentally understood that public opinion was merely something that could be manufactured: propaganda would make people believe anything the regime wanted them to. As Reichsmarshal Goering told the Nuremberg Tribunal: “it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”
Blame the Jews, the Communists, the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, the atheists, anything to avoid looking internally for real causes of and real solutions to complex probems.
So will it be fire or ice that gets us. Eric Holthaus, writing in Grist, says ice.
The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites “The Doomsday Glacier.”) Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today…
In the past few years, scientists have identified marine ice-cliff instability as a feedback loop that could kickstart the disintegration of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet this century — much more quickly than previously thought.
Minute-by-minute, huge skyscraper-sized shards of ice cliffs would crumble into the sea, as tall as the Statue of Liberty and as deep underwater as the height of the Empire State Building. The result: a global catastrophe the likes of which we’ve never seen.
I enjoy Eric’s writing. He employs some hyperbole, but always links to original sources you can drill into if you want to. Regarding the hyperbole though, here is some criticism of him in the Guardian:
I was particularly concerned about some of the implied time scales and impacts. That ‘slowly burying every shoreline…creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees…could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years’ (it could begin then, but would take far longer). That ‘the full 11 feet’ could be unlocked by 2100 (Rob and Dave predicted the middle of next century). That cities will be ‘wiped off the map’ (we will adapt, because the costs of protecting coastlines are predicted to be far less than those of flooding). We absolutely should be concerned about climate risks, and reduce them. But black-and-white thinking and over-simplification don’t help with risk management, they hinder.
Is “the entire scientific community [in] emergency mode”? We are cautious, and trying to learn more. Climate prediction is a strange game. It takes decades to test our predictions, so society must make decisions with the best evidence but always under uncertainty. I understand why a US-based climate scientist would feel particularly pessimistic. But we have to take care not to talk about the apocalypse as if it were inevitable.
Maybe, but if the cost of protecting cities is less than the cost of flooding, perhaps our U.S. politicians could get to work on that instead of continuing to bury their heads in the sand and pretend science doesn’t exist, even if the time frame is uncertain. Remember the serious scientists are arguing here over whether the most likely scenario is the one that has been presented over the past few years, or something worse. They are not arguing that it might actually be better than they thought.
Harvard Kennedy School has a new report on North Korea and biological weapons. It is not as alarming as it maybe could be. They almost certainly have the ability to produce them, as does any country, company, or institution with modern agricultural technology. There is no clear evidence that they have made a large-scale attempt to weaponize or deploy them.