Science

The Science of Sleep: Some Links

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Given my own tendency toward sleep deprivation, I found the following links illuminating:

Evil Pharmaceutical Companies and Drugs for Profit

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"Profits over people! Mwahaha!"
“Profits over people! Mwahaha!”

Many cannot seem to wrap their heads around the high costs of pharmaceuticals. The typical claim is that pharmaceutical companies are evil and greedy, plundering the pockets of those sick and desperate and exploiting the misery of others. While there are numerous reasons for the expensiveness of drugs, very few seem to realize that one of the major contributors is the actual science. Thankfully, Scientific American has published two articles on the subject by chemist Ashutosh Jogalekar: “Why Drugs Are Expensive: It’s the Science, Stupid” and “Why Drug Discovery Is Hard – Part 2: Easter Island, Pit Vipers; Where Do Drugs Come From?” The articles go very well with the following ReasonTV video (from 2009) on medical innovation. Worth thinking about.

The Dark Side of EI

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Wheaton professor Adam Grant has an interesting article in The Atlantic on “The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence.” Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman has popularized the term since the 1990s (along with social intelligence). Goleman’s research helped establish that traits other than IQ can lead to success in organizations and individual lives. But just as impressive cognitive abilities can be used for immoral purposes, so can a strong handle on emotions. Grant points to emerging research that found “when a leader gave an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was less likely to scrutinize the message and remembered less of the content. Ironically, audience members were so moved by the speech that they claimed to recall more of it.” Futhermore, “when people have self-serving motives, emotional intelligence becomes a weapon for manipulating others.” Other experts found “emotional intelligence helps people disguise one set of emotions while expressing another for personal gain.” While these findings may not be surprising, a comprehensive analysis of emotional intelligence literature revealed something that might be:

In jobs that required extensive attention to emotions, higher emotional intelligence translated into better performance…However, in jobs that involved fewer emotional demands, the results reversed. The more emotionally intelligent employees were, the lower their job performance. For mechanics, scientists, and accountants, emotional intelligence was a liability rather than an asset. Although more research is needed to unpack these results, one promising explanation is that these employees were paying attention to emotions when they should have been focusing on their tasks.

Grant concludes, “Thanks to more rigorous research methods, there is growing recognition that emotional intelligence—like any skill—can be used for good or evil. So if we’re going to teach emotional intelligence in schools and develop it at work, we need to consider the values that go along with it and where it’s actually useful.”

Book Review: Darwin

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Paul Johnson, Darwin: Portrait of a Genius (New York: Viking, 2012).

Popular historian Paul Johnson’s slim biography/analysis of Charles Darwin and his theory is a surprisingly satisfying read in light of its relatively short length (clocking in under 200 pages). While likely of passing interest to scholars and those already well-acquainted with Darwin’s life, Johnson’s brief, but informative overview will be of value to the general reader. Johnson does a fine job of accurately describing what Darwin actually wrote and distinguishing it from those things that are often placed in his mouth. While he engages in a bit of pop psychology to support some of his sweeping statements, Johnson is nonetheless fresh and thoughtful in his writing. Most important, Johnson is able to paint a vivid picture of the broader context from which Darwin’s ideas emerged. This is consistent with one of Johnson’s major themes: ideas matter and often take on a life of their own. Thus, Darwin’s Malthusian interpretation of the evidence viewed evolutionary life as a vicious, violent struggle for existence. This outlook in turn aided other ideologies and movements that sought to use Darwinism to bolster their own worldviews, including eugenics, Nazism, and Communism. It is this latter portion on which some negative reviewers have focused their attention, despite the fact that it consists of only one chapter (Ch. 7 “Evils of Social Darwinism”). Mark Stern at Slate writes that Johnson’s “discussion of the world’s reaction to The Origin of Species” is “admittedly engaging.” Furthermore, he sees “Johnson’s overview of Darwin’s theory of evolution” as “clear, rich, and accurate.” Yet, the majority of his review is dedicated to explaining that there is “intellectual harm, historical harm, and moral harm” in linking Darwin to any of the 20th-century atrocities. The review’s subtitle describes the book as “the latest effort to smear evolution by natural selection.” Of course, Stern explains that such a book obviously comes from “a conservative, family-values-promoting British intellectual” who “has spoken out against divorce, liberation theology, unions, atheism, the Enlightenment, and even the Beatles.” Another (albeit shorter) review in the New Scientist bluntly states that Johnson’s book is nothing more than “a vendetta, an agenda-driven hatchet-job.” There is some truth to these criticisms. Johnson does emphasize that Darwin was a “poor anthropologist” who “did not bring to his observation of humans the same care, objectivity, acute notation, and calmness he always showed when studying birds and sea creatures, insects, plants, and animals” (pg. 29). For example, Johnson points to Darwin’s opinions of the Fuegan “savages” during his voyage on the Beagle as evidence of his lacking in anthropology. While an important factor, I’m reminded of another scholar’s take on the matter:

When incautious scholars or blinkered fundamentalists accuse Darwin or [German Darwinist Ernst] Haeckel of racism, they simply reveal to an astonished world that these thinkers lived in the nineteenth century.[ref]Robert J. Richards, “Myth 19: That Darwin and Haeckel Were Complicit in Nazi Biology,” Galileo Goes to Jail: And Other Myths About Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 174.[/ref]

Read more

Science & Mormonism: Cosmos, Earth & Man

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The Interpreter Foundation sponsored a conference in early November on (as the title indicates) the interaction of science and Mormonism. The conference videos were recently posted at the Interpreter website. The following is the list of presenters and participants:

  • David H. Bailey
    Berkeley National Laboratory (ret.) and University of California, Davis
  • Emily Bates
    Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Bates Laboratory, University of Colorado
  • Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
    Senior Research Scientist. Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
  • R. Paul Evans
    Assistant Professor of Microbiology & Molecular Biology, Brigham Young University
  • Ron Hellings
    Research Professor, Department of Physics, Montana State University
  • Bart J. Kowallis
    Professor, Department of Geological Sciences, Brigham Young University
  • John S. Lewis
    Professor Emeritus of Planetary Sciences, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona and Chief Scientist, Deep Space Industries
  • Steven L. Peck
    Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Brigham Young University
  • Jani Radebaugh
    Associate Professor, Department of Geological Sciences, Brigham Young University
  • Michael R. Stark
    Associate Professor, Department of Physiology & Developmental Biology – Neuroscience, Brigham Young University
  • Trent D. Stephens
    Professor Emeritus of Anatomy and Embryology, Idaho State University
  • Amy L. Williams
    Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Columbia University
  • Richard N. Williams
    Founding Director, The Wheatley Institution, Brigham Young University

I’m excited for more conferences of this sort in the future. Be sure to check out the videos.

Stephen Wolfram Wants To Solve Programming

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Super-smart guy Stephen Wolfram is proposing to create a new general purpose programming language that is powerful and easy to use, called Wolfram Language.

I’m skeptical. He doesn’t propose to be doing anything particularly innovative or ground-breaking:

“There are plenty of existing general-purpose computer languages. But their vision is very different—and in a sense much more modest—than the Wolfram Language. They concentrate on managing the structure of programs, keeping the language itself small in scope, and relying on a web of external libraries for additional functionality. In the Wolfram Language my concept from the very beginning has been to create a single tightly integrated system in which as much as possible is included right in the language itself.”

This isn’t a new idea. The problem with such an approach is that it forces users of the language to pack a lot of code into their programs that they aren’t using. In this era of high-capacity hard drives this isn’t such a huge deal for, for example, general-purpose machines like desktop PCs, but it does have repercussions for the language’s usability in embedded systems and the like.

It’s also tough to discern exactly what he’s talking about. Programming languages are meant to be tools, or better yet, provide a source of tools, like a toolbelt. Java, for example, comes with a lot of useful functionality out of the box, without any “external libraries,” but the functionality provided by those built-in libraries is akin to the tools in your toolbelt–they aren’t particularly useful in the context of a finished project but they are integral to the construction and proper functioning of that project.

wolfram-language-categories

Wolfram appears to want to include what amount to finished projects in his new programming language. The usefulness of this is limited because the strength of programming languages isn’t really in their final products, but in what their basic tools allow you to accomplish.

He says:

“And so in the Wolfram Language, built right into the language, are capabilities for laying out graphs or doing image processing or creating user interfaces or whatever.”

All modern programming languages have these functionalities, either natively or as part of external libraries. All Wolfram is doing is forcing users of his language to pack them along. The primary appeal I see of this approach is consistency and (hopefully) guaranteed compatibility, which, don’t mistake, is a wonderful goal, but to try and accurately predict what programmers need ahead of time, particularly years down the road, is asking for trouble.

Instead of creating a general purpose programming language as he claims, Wolfram appears to be creating a programming language specially suited toward using this giant set of pre-built functions. Unless by “general purpose,” Wolfram thinks he has enclosed the majority of useful computation under the umbrella of his own libraries, but that’s quite a claim to make. As a programmer continually dissatisfied with the state of programming languages, I wish him luck, but I’m not overly hopeful.

Leading Health Care Innovation

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With the debates over Obamacare raging, the editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine have collaborated to produce an online forum entitled “Leading Health Care Innovation.” As the “Editors’ Welcome” post explains,

It is a forum for the debate and a place where members of the health care sector can share the results of their efforts to innovate. The insight center is pilot endeavor designed to test the waters for a permanent publication, and we welcome your feedback.

The insight center will run from Sept. 17 until Nov. 15. Its contents will span three broad areas:

  • The “Big Ideas” section will feature articles about the foundational principles in the formulation of a high-value health care system.

  • The “Managing Innovations” section will focus on the organization and delivery of health care and how to orchestrate change.

  • The “From the Front Lines” section will offer accounts of solutions to specific problems that practitioners have implemented in their organizations.

Definitely worth checking out.

Fiction Reading Is Good For the Soul

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Almost a year ago, I wrote a post over at Worlds Without End entitled “A Not-So-Novel Way to Read the Book of Mormon.” It reviewed the psychological benefits of reading fiction vs. non-fiction (i.e. narratives/stories vs. straight information) and applied it to reading the Book of Mormon, which Mormons are frequently encouraged to do by Church leaders. Research over the years has found those who read fiction compared to non-fiction tend to develop greater social abilities, changes in personality and emotions, and increased empathy. This is due to readers identifying and empathizing with characters in the novels. The novels act as a kind of social simulation for the mind.

A brand new article in Science continues the trend by demonstrating that reading literature helps readers understand the mental states of others. Such finds are very exciting, in my view. Makes me glad that I started reading fiction again (thanks, Nathaniel). Check out Reason‘s write-up on the article.

Massive NYT Article on Women and Science

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2013-10-11 Women in Science

Eileen Pollack has a very long article in the New York Times that goes in-depth on the issue of why there are so few women in science. It’s a great, comprehensive overview of the subject with references to pretty much all the major studies that have recently come out about the issue. I won’t try to summarize it, but if you’re at all interested in the subject (I am), you should read this article.

Also: you should be interested in this subject.