Uh-oh.......................

 thanks Kurt

Warren Weaver..........................

     Warren Weaver is not a household name, but he may be the most influential scientist you've never heard of, actively shaping three of the most important scientific revolutions of the last century—life sciences, information technology, and agriculture.   In 1932 Weaver joined the Rockefeller Foundation to lead the division charged with supporting scientific research.  Funding was scarce during the Great Depression, and the Rockefeller Foundation, with an endowment nearly twice the size of Harvard's at the time, was one of the most important patrons of scientific research in the world.  Over his nearly three decades at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver acted as a banker, talent scout, and kingmaker to support the nascent field of molecular biology, a term he himself coined.  Weaver had an uncanny knack for picking future all-stars.  Eighteen scientists won Nobel Prizes for research related to molecular biology in the middle of the century, and Weaver had funded all but three of them.

-Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt,  Simple Rules:  How To Thrive In A Complex World

in the service of optimizing.................

Although both confirmatory thought and exploratory thought can be high-cognitive-effort responses to accountability, they differ in important ways. Whereas confirmatory thought involves a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view, exploratory thought involves even-handed consideration of alternative points of view. In short, although both exploratory and confirmatory thought can be effortful, one takes place in the service of self-justification whereas the other takes place in the service of optimizing a judgment/decision. 

-Philip Tetlock and Jennifer Lerner, as extracted from this research work

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And winging it is so much more fun.........

"It's amazing how much research has gone into making some of the worst decisions."

-Ashleigh Brilliant

When is Three Billion Dollars..............

...............................................considered not a lot of money?

Well, here for starters.  Still it is an immensely generous act.  May they be blessed with positive outcomes.

Faster, please............................

...................................Scientific advances continue to amaze.

Interesting paragraphs...........................................

      The Japanese government in particular is investing millions in its own studies of El Nino, and for good reason.  Japan has historically been a magnet for highly destructive Pacific typhoons, storms that, along with the earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions that bring regular ruin, have helped forge the national character traits of stoicism and mutual philanthropy.  Forecasting such traumatic occurrences would of course be a fine thing, for the national economy, for the nation's morale.  The recent accelerating ability to forecast the eruptions of volcanoes may still not have been matched by an ability to predict earthquakes.  But to balance that, a major effort is now being made in Japan to fine-tune global long-term weather forecasting, and in particular to investigate the possibilities of predicting when an El Nino - with its clustering of typhoons - is most likely to occur.


-Simon Winchester,  Pacific:  Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers

Passion trumps reason..............

I had been obsessively, ruminatively, fruitlessly trying to figure out who I was and what I would do without work or love or children to care for.  It was like formulating an argument when the premises refuse to yield the conclusion, or analyzing a data set that makes no sense.  But if I couldn’t figure myself out, I decided, I could at least try to figure out Desideri, and so I lost myself in his book, and his life.
-Alison Gopnik

If a story on good-old-fashioned intellectual sleuthing sparks any interest,  you really should read this essay.  It has it all.
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From the "Life Is Strange" file.................

"According to economist Glen Weyl, the average salary of a top-25 hedge fund manager is more than that of all teachers in the Chicago school district combined."
-as excerpted from here

The brain asks, "Could this possibly be true?"   The Oracle Google was consulted.  The Chicago Public School system employed 22,519 teachers for the 2013-14 year (total employees of CPS, same year, = 41,579).   Since the average pay for a Chicago Public School teacher is a bit more that $71,000, that would mean, for the above quote to be true, that the average salary of a top-25 hedge fund manager was $1,598,849,000.  Seems difficult to believe. Yet, a few more clicks on Google and we find this, In total, the 25 highest-earning hedge fund managers and traders made $24.3 billion in 2013.   So, in conclusion, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that in 2014 your basic top-tier successful hedge fund manager made more money than all of the teachers in the Chicago Public School system combined.  Holy career choices, Batman.   Hope he/she created a ginormous amount of value.

Who knew...........................................

..................there was such a thing as "interruption science"?

Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call.  Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes - which means we're never caught up with our lives.
-Pico Iyer, as excerpted from The Art of Stillness:  Adventures in Going Nowhere

thanks david

Royal life in Spain............................

.................................................................4,000 years ago.

Growing up I was never interested, but archaeology looks like fun.

Interesting take on competition.......................

"Political affiliations generally do not impact population growth.  However, our research reveals that a key to growth is a 'competitive' political environment.  Areas dominated by a single party (either Democrats or Republicans) tend to grow more slowly than communities where political control is tenuous.  Thus, political competition, similar to economic competition, fuels growth."
-Dr. Peter Linneman, NAI Global Chief Economist, as excerpted from here

Stuff you always wanted to know............

Why do Americans call the beautiful game "soccer" instead of "football"?  Read this article and you will know more about the subject, and get a short history lesson as part of the bargain.

How science is supposed to work...............

What we see here is a very important part of scientific methodology, researchers holding conflicting theories spurring each other on to new discoveries and deeper knowledge of the field under examination. The heuristics of the two are almost irrelevant, what is important here is the disagreement as research motor. Also very nicely illustrated is discovery as an evolutionary process spread over time rather than the infamous eureka moment.

-as excerpted from this post at the Renaissance Mathematicus blog

Bring on the eggs and butter............................

My Mom, one of the healthiest people on the planet until she was 86 or so, loved her morning egg, evening bowl of ice cream, and cooking with butter.  She was not a big believer in the government's "food pyramid."  Here is a longish essay detailing reasons why the government has had it all wrong.  Excerpt here:

Seeing the U.S. population grow sicker and fatter while adhering to official dietary guidelines has put nutrition authorities in an awkward position. Recently, the response of many researchers has been to blame "Big Food" for bombarding Americans with sugar-laden products. No doubt these are bad for us, but it is also fair to say that the food industry has simply been responding to the dietary guidelines issued by the AHA and USDA, which have encouraged high-carbohydrate diets and until quite recently said next to nothing about the need to limit sugar.

thanks Stuart

Hard to believe............................

"Research and development in government is always a long and painstaking process," says Mr O'Neill.  "But if it were easy, then government would waste even more money, and faster."
-as excerpted from this story in The Economist

In defense of research..............................

"The philistine fixation with temporary utility is swamped in the long run by the enduring power of ideas. And just one discovery such as calculus, gravity or democracy will pay for a lot of research.

"Of course, there is a lot of bad and useless research. But as the Polish example illustrates, it is difficult to decide which research is useless or how research will influence our lives."

-John Kay, as excerpted from this article

And this is news because why....................?

"Good evidence now exists that there is a body of management practices which is strongly associated with better performance, regardless of time or place."

-as excerpted from Schumpeter's latest essay on Measuring management in the latest The Economist.  You can find it here.

And here I thought blogging was making me more idiosyncratic, not less.........

Over the last few decades, neuroscientists, psychologists and other researchers have carried out scores of studies on the mental effects of hypertext, multimedia, multitasking, interruption and distraction. The bulk of these studies point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards. … We’ve begun to sacrifice other modes of thinking, particularly those that require sustained attention and concentration, which involve contemplation, reflection, introspection. … It’s altering the balance of our thought.”

According to Carr, “We can be very efficient, very productive, without those modes of thought, but as human beings we become flatter, less interesting, less intellectually distinctive and adventurous. I think as well that our ideas and our decisions tend to become narrower, more derivative, as we lose the richness of deep, idiosyncratic thought.” 

The preceding (and the brain image for the following post) was excerpted from this blog post.

Call off the search............................

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
-Albert Camus

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