Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

The value of a doctorate

In their Christmas issue, The Economist included a special feature on PhDs, arguing that they may be a relatively poor choice for many people. The article contains some interesting nuggets:

  • “[U]niversities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.”
  • “PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too… Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that [I]f American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.
  • “In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%.”
  • “Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.”
  • “In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.”
  • “Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.”

All this relates to the earlier discussion here about the recession and the value of grad school.

I do personally see appeal in doing a doctorate, but much of the appeal comes from the possibility of 2-5 more years of student life. Working full time for more than three years has definitely given me more appreciation for the lifestyle of students – cash-strapped though it may be.

Common misconceptions

XKCD has some good advice. Everyone should read the article ‘List of common misconceptions‘ on Wikipedia, if only so that they personally can stop spreading them.

There are a few on the list I have been guilty of believing myself at various points. The truth is:

  • There is no evidence that Iron maidens were invented in the Middle Ages or even used for torture.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short.
  • A belief that decades/centuries/millennia begin not on the year ending in 0, but rather on the subsequent year ending in 1 (e.g., “The current millennium didn’t really begin on January 1, 2000, but rather on January 1, 2001”) — based on an assumption that there was no year 0 — are founded in an incomplete understanding of historical calculation.
  • Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house.” Palin actually said “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
  • Some cooks believe that food items cooked with wine or liquor will be non-alcoholic, because alcohol’s low boiling point causes it to evaporate quickly when heated. However, a study found that much of the alcohol remains – 25% after 1 hour of baking or simmering, and 10% after 2 hours.
  • When a meteor lands on Earth (after which it is termed a meteorite), it is not usually hot.
  • Different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue by taste buds.
  • Although there are hair care products which are marketed as being able to repair split ends and damaged hair, there is no such cure.
  • Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children.
  • A person who is drowning does not wave and call for help, as in fictional depictions of drowning.
  • It is not nutritionally necessary to combine multiple sources of vegetable protein in a single meal in order to metabolize a “complete” protein in a vegetarian diet. Unless a person’s diet was heavily dependent on only fruit, only tubers, or only junk food, he or she would be virtually certain of getting enough protein if he or she were eating enough calories.
  • It’s a common myth that an earthworm becomes two worms when cut in half. This is not correct. When an earthworm is bisected, only the front half of the worm (where the mouth is located) can survive, while the other half dies.
  • The flight mechanism and aerodynamics of the bumblebee (as well as other insects) are actually quite well understood, in spite of the urban legend that calculations show that they should not be able to fly.
  • Contrary to the common myth, the Coriolis effect does not determine the direction that water rotates in a bathtub drain or a flushing toilet.
  • It is not true that air takes the same time to travel above and below an aircraft’s wing.
  • Glass is not a high-viscosity liquid at room temperature: it is an amorphous solid, although it does have some chemical properties normally associated with liquids.
  • No scientist ever lost his life because of his scientific views, at least to the knowledge of historians of science.

I have seen many of these repeated in rather reputable sources.

TAL on the credit crunch

For those seeking to understand the subprime mortgage crisis, there are a couple of episodes of This American Life which explain important aspects in an accessible way:

  • #355: Giant Pool of Money
  • #405: Inside Job

Both are available for $0.99 through the iTunes Store.

Update [2021-05-23]: Direct links: The Giant Pool of Money, Inside Job, Another Frightening Show About the Economy

John Gamel on vision

For Christmas, I received The Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens. So far, the most interesting among them has been “The Elegant Eyeball” by John Gamel, originally published in The Alaska Quarterly Review.

Despite being slightly astigmatic, I had never given much thought to eye health or ocular diseases. What was most startling and unsettling about Gamel’s account was the description of the pain associated with maladies like dry corneas or glaucoma. For some reason, I had assumed that eye illnesses simply involved the painless loss of sight, not the sort of agony he describes.

Ultimately, the essay is a reflection on the inevitability of deterioration and death in human bodies – the way time invariably takes away the most precious, necessary, and appreciated of human faculties. Gamel describes one patient – a professor of anthropology at Stanford – who responded to Gamel’s ultimate inability to stave off his macular degeneration with a mixture of realism and humility: “Why so sad, doctor? You look like you just lost your best friend. Who do you think you are – a magician, a god who turns old men into young men?”

Gamel does describe one area where there has been significant progress: in the use of intentional retinal scarification using lasers, to reduce the rate and seriousness of sight loss associated with diabetes. He describes how the treatment has helped hundreds of thousands of people to read and drive for years after diabetic retionopathy would otherwise have blinded them.

Such successful extensions aside, the resounding message of Gamel’s piece is that our own sense of the inevitability of our extending lives and vitality is an illusion. As such, we had best make full enjoyment of our vision while it remains acute.

Testing Google’s OCR

Previously, I briefly mentioned the optical character recognition (OCR) technology within Google Docs. I decided to test it in the relatively challenging circumstance of converting photographs of pages from a book into text:

As you can see, the image to text conversion isn’t perfect. Indeed, it doesn’t work terribly well in the conditions to which I subjected it. Substantial strings of text are missing, and there are many errors.

Probably, the system would work better if the pages had been perfectly flat and evenly illuminated, and if my camera had been perfectly parallel to the page.

The wastrel child effect

Talking with Lauren the other day, it occurred to me that the strongest force redistributing wealth across human history has quite possibly not been progressive taxation of income or estate taxes. Rather, it may be the tendency of the children of the wealthy and powerful to be hopeless wastrels. One generation builds up a gigantic fortune and the next one (or two, or three) disperses it again with some combination of bad decisions and lavish living.

It seems plausible to say that really gigantic fortunes only build up when some new factor unbalances the existing economic system. For instance, companies realize that it will only be possible to train staff in the use of one computer operating system. In the process, Microsoft and Bill Gates make colossal fortunes. Similar explanations can be used when it comes to railroad barons, the current wealth of Gulf oil states, and so on.

The people who build up these fortunes probably always need a combination of talent and good luck. They need to have the giant fortune opportunity in the first place, and then they need to act effectively to realize it. The sort of people who are able to do that are probably pretty unusual, for the most part. By contrast, their offspring are more likely to be normal in traits like intelligence (regression to the mean). It is also entirely possible that they will live seriously distorted lives, as the result of parental success. This is as true of the heir to a major fortune or family business as it is to the heir to a particularly successful hereditary monarch. Once in a while, they may be able to build on the success of their predecessor. More often – I would wager – they either start or perpetuate the decline of that success.

All told, it is probably an extremely good thing that the children of people like Elizabeth I or Bill Gates don’t generally rise to the level of success of their parents. Given how limited most states are – when it comes to putting checks on income inequality – it seems plausible to me that a world with a high probability of hereditary success would probably be one ruled by powerful families reminiscent of the Middle Ages. The fact that there is at least the occasional mad or incompetent person who ends up in a position to squander the family’s wealth and influence is probably a significant reason why we don’t all live like peasants, ruled over by feudal lords.

If it hasn’t already been done, somebody should undertake a statistical analysis of the relative financial success of the children of highly wealthy individuals. It could cover as long a span as we have good records for (which would vary by country) and would help to establish the significance of this hypothesized wastrel effect. As I said, I would not personally be surprised if the total economic effect has been redistribution on a greater scale than that achieved by taxation.

How to start a cult

While I am having difficulty finding a reputable source to confirm it, I have been told the following odd thing about human psychology: if a person wears glasses that flip their vision upside down, about three days later their brain will adjust and invert their sight. If they then remove the glasses, their vision will seem to be upside down before it flips again, more quickly.

I don’t think all that many people are aware of this quirk of human psychology. As such, it seems like something you could build a cult around.

You would come up with a long and convincing build-up to a supposedly sacred ritual in which people wear the glasses. You tell them that if their vision eventually flips, it is because your deity has deemed them worthy of being tested. Then, you tell them that when they remove the glasses, one of two things will happen. Either their vision will be inverted forever, or it will flip back. Tell them that if it flips back, it means your deity has found them worthy, and they are on track for some sort of magnificent afterlife.

Because people would think the flipping was supernatural, it would make a gullible subset believe anything else you cared to tell them (like about how they need to sell their home to help fund the crystal statue that will bring about the end of the world). Eventually, people will leave the cult and tell their story, and neurologists will appear on the news to explain that the vision-flipping is normal and being used to scam people. By then, however, you will be long gone with a lot of money.

I think this could work partly because vision is such a key part of a person’s life. Seeing it flip would be a powerful emotional experience, especially if you were prepared in advance to interpret it in a specific metaphysical way. The period between the first and second flip would be full of anxiety – since you already know the flipping is possible, but fear it could be permanent for you. Then, the second flip would really lock at least a few people in. It would feed their narcissism by telling them they are special, and it would seem to be something beyond the power of ordinary science or reasoning to explain.

I think people have probably bought into cults on the basis of less convincing evidence than this. Get a couple of celebrity adherents and the road to wealth and influence would be short and smooth.

Disclaimer: While you might actually be able to start a cult in this way, it wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do.

Obama the schemer?

Writing in The Ottawa Citizen, David Warren echoes an interesting hypothesis about Barack Obama first expressed by Charles Krauthammer: namely, that Obama is a lot more strategic than he seems.

He claims – among other things – that Obama might be intentionally alienating the most left wing voters, in order to improve his electoral prospects by appealing to centrists.

I don’t know how convincing the hypothesis ultimately is. For one thing, if Obama was secretly a brilliant election-winning political operator, he would probably have done better in the midterms.

Ottawa Biking Problems

Ottawa Biking Problems is a website that lets people report dangerous or inconvenient cycling facilities in Ottawa. The site includes a summary of some of the worst problems in town.

All told, this seems like quite a good idea. It allows information to be aggregated in a useful way, which could help the city to fix the most serious problems first.

Some cycling safety issues have been discussed on this site before.