November 2012 – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

71,000 Years Ago “These People Were Like You & I”

“Scientists at the Pinnacle Point excavation.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) A trove of sophisticated stone tools recently dug up from a South African cliff suggests early modern humans developed complex cognitive ability anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 years earlier than many scientists believe.

In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers said they had unearthed a large number of small stone blades going back some 71,000 years. The heat-treated blades appear to have been designed for tipping spears or arrows that could be used for hunting game.
Crucially, the discovery indicates that these ancestors had the cognitive ability to manipulate complex tools. In addition, they were able to pass on their inventions to future generations. That, in turn, suggests the use of sophisticated language.
“What it’s showing us is that these people were like you and I,” said Curtis Marean, a paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., co-author of the study, and leader of the South Africa project. “They were smart people.”
. . .
Dr. Marean and his colleagues unearthed the microliths at a site known as Pinnacle Point on the southern shore of South Africa. They began the dig in 2005.
Some 72,000 years ago, the earth was wrapped in a glacial chill that lasted about 12,000 years. The African interior was dry and many early modern humans would have moved to more hospitable locations, such as the southern coast.

For the full story, see:
GAUTAM NAIK. “U.S. NEWS (sic); Tool Clue to Early Man’s Mind.” The Wall Street Journal (Thur., November 8, 2012): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was updated August 22, 2012 and had the title “WORLD NEWS; Tools Hint at Earlier Start for Human Smarts.)

“Microlith blades.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Econometric “Priests” Sell Their New “Gimmicks” as the “Latest Euphoria Drug”

The American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives published a symposium focused on the thought-provoking views of the distinguished econometrician Edward Leamer.
I quote below some of Leamer’s comments in his own contribution to the symposium.

(p. 31) We economists trudge relentlessly toward Asymptopia, where data are unlimited and estimates are consistent, where the laws of large numbers apply perfectly and where the full intricacies of the economy are completely revealed. But it’s a frustrating journey, since, no matter how far we travel, Asymptopia remains infinitely far
away. Worst of all, when we feel pumped up with our progress, a tectonic shift can occur, like the Panic of 2008, making it seem as though our long journey has left us disappointingly close to the State of Complete Ignorance whence we began.

The pointlessness of much of our daily activity makes us receptive when the Priests of our tribe ring the bells and announce a shortened path to Asymptopia. (Remember the Cowles Foundation offering asymptotic properties of simultaneous equations estimates and structural parameters?) We may listen, but we don’t hear, when the Priests warn that the new direction is only for those with Faith, those with complete belief in the Assumptions of the Path. It often takes years down the Path, but sooner or later, someone articulates the concerns that gnaw away in each of (p. 32) us and asks if the Assumptions are valid. (T. C. Liu (1960) and Christopher Sims (1980) were the ones who proclaimed that the Cowles Emperor had no clothes.) Small seeds of doubt in each of us inevitably turn to despair and we abandon that direction and seek another.
Two of the latest products-to-end-all-suffering are nonparametric estimation and consistent standard errors, which promise results without assumptions, as if we were already in Asymptopia where data are so plentiful that no assumptions are needed. But like procedures that rely explicitly on assumptions, these new methods work well in the circumstances in which explicit or hidden assumptions hold tolerably well and poorly otherwise. By disguising the assumptions on which nonparametric methods and consistent standard errors rely, the purveyors of these methods have made it impossible to have an intelligible conversation about the circumstances in which their gimmicks do not work well and ought not to be used. As for me, I prefer to carry parameters on my journey so I know where I am and where I am going, not travel stoned on the latest euphoria drug.
This is a story of Tantalus, grasping for knowledge that remains always beyond reach. In Greek mythology Tantalus was favored among all mortals by being asked to dine with the gods. But he misbehaved–some say by trying to take divine food back to the mortals, some say by inviting the gods to a dinner for which Tantalus boiled his son and served him as the main dish. Whatever the etiquette faux pas, Tantalus was punished by being immersed up to his neck in water. When he bowed his head to drink, the water drained away, and when he stretched up to eat the fruit hanging above him, wind would blow it out of reach. It would be much healthier for all of us if we could accept our fate, recognize that perfect knowledge will be forever beyond our reach and find happiness with what we have. If we stopped grasping for the apple of Asymptopia, we would discover that our pool of Tantalus is full of small but enjoyable insights and wisdom.

For the full article, see:
Leamer, Edward E. “Tantalus on the Road to Asymptopia.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 31-46.

“The Bulk of New Yorkers Do Not Have an Unlimited Appetite for Growing Their Own Kale”

“. . . , Ena K. McPherson holds the key to three different community gardens.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) There is some evidence, . . . , that the bulk of New Yorkers do not have an unlimited appetite for growing their own kale. Official counts of New York gardens are fragmentary. But John Ameroso, the Johnny Appleseed of the New York community garden movement, suspects that the number of present-day gardens — around 800 — may be half what it was in the mid-1980s.

In his long career as an urban extension agent for Cornell University, Mr. Ameroso, 67, kept a log with ratings of all the plots he visited. “I remember that there were a lot of gardens that were not in use or minimally used,” he said. “Into the later ’80s, a lot of these disappeared or were abandoned. Or maybe there was one person working them. If nothing was developed on them, they just got overgrown.”
The truth, Ms. Stone said, is that at any giv-(p. D6)en time, perhaps 10 percent of the city’s current stock of almost 600 registered GreenThumb gardens is growing mostly weeds. “In East New York, I can tell you that there are basically many gardens that are barely functioning now.”
. . .
An honest census would reveal that many gardens (perhaps most) depend on just one or two tireless souls, said Ena K. McPherson, a Brooklyn garden organizer. She would know because she’s one of them.
Ms. McPherson holds the keys to three community gardens in Bedford-Stuyvesant. (Ms. Stone appreciatively refers to these blocks as “the Greater Ena McPherson Zone.”) And she serves on the operations committee for the nonprofit Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, which holds the deeds to 32 garden plots.
“In an ideal situation, we would have gardens with everyone in the community participating,” Ms. McPherson said. “But in fact, a few die-hard people end up carrying the flag.”
. . .
The original gardens followed the city’s vacant lots, which by 1978 numbered 32,000. Mr. Ameroso, though trained in agronomy, pitched them as an instrument for community renewal. “How did you take back your block?” he said. “Put in a community garden and stop that dumping.”
Ms. Stone, who laughingly (and earnestly) describes herself as a socialist, continues to embrace something of this mission. “All the people who are marginal in society — and I’m not using that as a judgmental term, it’s children, senior citizens, people on disability, the 47 percent — these people are the main power people in the garden,” she said.
These days, Mr. Ameroso espouses more of what he calls an “urban agriculture” model: a food garden with a dedicated farmers’ market or a C.S.A. These amenities make stakeholders out of neighbors who may not like dirt under their nails and rural farmers who drive in every weekend.
“The urban-agriculture ones are flourishing,” he said. “There’s a lot of excitement. They’re active eight days a week.” But “community gardens, as such, where people come in to take care of their own boxes — those are not flourishing.”
It’s almost a cliché to point out that this new green model seems to have attracted tillers with a different skin tone. “Back then,” Mr. Ameroso said of his earlier career, “when we worked in Bronx or Bed-Stuy, it was mostly communities of color. Now when we talk about the urban agriculture stuff, it’s white people in their 30s.”
What explains this demographic shift?
“I have no idea,” he said. “I’m still baffled by it, and I’m involved in it!”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL TORTORELLO. “IN THE GARDEN; Growing Everything but Gardeners.” The New York Times (Sat., November 1, 2012): D1 & D6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated October 31, 2012.)

AMA Resists the Democratization of DNA

The “Walgreens flap” mentioned below was the episode in 2010 when Walgreens announced that it would cell a genome testing saliva kit, but was pressured by government regulatory agencies, and withdrew the kit from the market within two days of the announcement.

(p. 119) . . . there will likely never be a “right time”—after we have passed some imaginary tipping point giving us critical, highly actionable, and perfectly accurate information—for it to be available to the public. The logical conclusion is that the tests should be made available. What’s more, the fact that they have been available has meant that democratization of DNA is real. Consumers now realize that they have the right to obtain data on their DNA. As a blogger wrote in response to the Walgreens flap, “To say that this information has to be routed through your doctor is a little like the Middle Ages, when only priests were allowed (or able) to read the Bible. Gutenberg came along with the printing press even though few people were able to read. This triggered a literacy/literature spiral that had incredible benefits for civilization, even if it reduced the power of the priestly class.”

The American Medical Association (AMA) sees things differently. In a pointed letter to the FDA in 2011, the AMA wrote: “We urge the Panel … that genetic testing, except under the most limited circumstances, should carried out under the personal supervision of a qualified health professional.” The FDA has indicated it is likely to accept the AMA recommendations, which will clearly limit consumer direct access to their DNA information. But this arrangement ultimately appears untenable, and eventually there will need to be full democratization of DNA for medicine to (p. 120) be transformed. Of course, health professionals can be consulted as needed, but it is the individual who should have the decision authority and capacity to drive the process.
The physician and entrepreneur Hugh Rienhoff, who has spent years attempting to decipher his daughter’s unexplained cardiovascular genetic defect and formed the online community MyDaughtersDNA.org, had this to say: “Doctors are not going to drive genetics into clinical practice. It’s going to be consumers …. The user interface, whether software or whatever will be embraced first by consumers, so it has to be pitched at that level, and that’s about the level doctors are at. Cardiologists do not know dog shit about genetics.”

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
(Note: first ellipsis added; other ellipses in original.)

Race Car Flywheels Save Fuel

“FLYWHEEL; Using a flywheel system from Williams Hybrid Power. Audi’s R18 e-tron quattro car became the first hybrid vehicle to win the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans race.” Source of caption: print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: http://www.williamshybridpower.com/#%2Ftechnology%2Fthe_flywheel

NASA costs are often justified by giving cases where innovations from space spillover into the consumer economy. But in the normal market economy, there are alternative sources of innovation that would spillover into the consumer economy, without taking taxpayer dollars. I wonder if anyone has ever studied how often race car innovations make their way into mainstream production cars?

(p. B4) European auto makers might turn to an unlikely source to reduce fuel consumption and pollution: gas-guzzling Formula One race cars.

Rotating mechanical devices called flywheels developed for these speed machines could make everyday cars more powerful and efficient.
. . .
Flywheels have been around since the Industrial Revolution, when they were widely used in steam engines. Mounted on a crankshaft, these spinning discs provide a steady flow of energy when the energy source isn’t constant, as is the case with piston-driven engines in cars.
Flywheels can range from about a meter in diameter to less than three centimeters, depending on the amount of energy required. The larger and heavier the flywheel is, the more inertial energy it delivers when spinning.
In miniature form, they show up in friction toy cars that are driven by a flywheel and speed up when the toy is rolled quickly across a surface. When the car is let go, it is the flywheel that speeds the car across the floor.
Until recently, flywheels–known in the auto industry as kinetic energy recovery systems, or KERS–have been too heavy or too bulky to use on road vehicles. But that is changing, thanks to new, lighter materials, high-tech engineering and power-management systems.

For the full story, see:
DAVID PEARSON. “NEXT IN TECH; An Unlikely Fuel Saver: Racing Cars; To Reduce Pollution, Auto Makers Experiment With Flywheels Developed for Formula One Motors.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., August 21, 2012): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was updated August 22, 2012.)

Organic Farming Too Unproductive to End African Starvation

(p. 6) There is no shortage of writing — often from a locavore point of view — in support of more organic methods of farming, for both developed and developing countries. These opinions recognize that current farming methods bring serious environmental problems involving water supplies, fertilizer runoff and energy use. Yet organic farming typically involves smaller yields — 5 to 34 percent lower, as estimated in a recent study in the journal Nature, depending on the crop and the context. For all the virtues of organic approaches, it’s hard to see how global food problems can be solved by starting with a cut in yields. Claims in this area are often based on wishful thinking rather than a hard-nosed sense of what’s practical.

For the full story, see:
TYLER COWEN. “ECONOMIC VIEW; World Hunger: The Problem Left Behind.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness (Sun., September 16, 2012): 6.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 15, 2012.)

Entrepreneurs of Coffee, the Battlefield, and Missing Minerals

Source of book image: http://img.qbd.com.au/product/l/9780691143705.jpg

[p. 167] The book . . . contains a variety of entertaining stories and colorful facts about entrepreneurship that could potentially be used for teaching. [p. 168] Murray, for instance, explains that the word “entrepreneur” was borrowed from the French language in the late Middle Ages, a time when it was used to describe a battlefield commander (p. 88). Kuran describes how Middle Eastern coffee entrepreneurs originally faced harsh resistance from many clerics who believed that “coffee drinkers reap hell-fire” (pp. 71-72). Hudson traces early merchant activity and entrepreneurship all the way back to Sumerian cities in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC (pp. 11-17). These cities, made rich by their fertile alluvial soil, still needed to acquire other important minerals, missing in their own ground, from the distant Iranian plateau or Anatolia. Since military conquest proved too expensive and because the Sumerian cities really needed these resources, they pioneered international import-export activities in their temples and palaces.

For the full review, see:
Bikard, Michael, and Scott Stern. “The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times.” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 1 (March 2011): 164-68.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the page numbers in square parentheses refer to the review; the page numbers in curved parentheses refer to the book under review.)

Book being reviewed:
Landes, David S., Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, eds. Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Personal Genomics Startups Struggle Under a “Circus” of Government Regulation

(p. 118) Government regulation of consumer genomics companies has been centerpiece (and the semblance of a circus) in their short history. Back in 2008, the states of California and New York sent “cease and desist” letters to the genome scan companies. State officials were concerned that the laboratories that generated the results were not certified as CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) and that the tests were being performed without a physician’s order. All three companies developed work-around plans in California and remained operational but were unable to market the tests in New York.
In 2010, the regulation issues escalated to the federal level. In May it was announced that 7,500 Walgreens drugstores throughout the United States would soon sell Pathway Genomics’s saliva kit for disease susceptibility and pharmacogenomics. While the tests produced by all four companies had been widely available via the Internet for three years, the announcement of wide-scale availability in drugstores (which was cancelled by Walgreens within two days) appeared to “cross the line” and set off a cascade of investigations and hearings by the FDA, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Congressional House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The FDA’s Alberto Gutierrez said, “We don’t think physi-(p. 119)cians are going to be able to interpret the results,” and “genetic tests are medical devices and must be regulated.” The GAO undertook a “sting” operation with its staff posing as consumers who bought genetic tests and detailed significant inconsistencies, misleading test results, and deceptive marketing practices in its report.
All four personal genomics companies are struggling.

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

Edison Foresaw Phonograph Music Potential

“EUROPEAN JOURNEY; Thomas Edison, seated center, sent Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann, standing behind him, to France in 1889. From there Wangemann traveled to Germany to record recitations and performances.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Edison is often ridiculed for failing to foresee that playing music would be a major use for his phonograph invention. (Nye 1991, p. 142 approvingly references Hughes 1986, p. 201 on this point.) But if Edison failed to foresee, then why did he assign Wangemann to make the phonograph “a marketable device for listening to music”?

(p. D3) Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.

The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. . . . Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.
. . .
The lid of the box held an important clue. It had been scratched with the words “Wangemann. Edison.”
The first name refers to Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann, who joined the laboratory in 1888, assigned to transform Edison’s newly perfected wax cylinder phonograph into a marketable device for listening to music. Wangemann became expert in such strategies as positioning musicians around the recording horn in a way to maximize sound quality.
In June 1889, Edison sent Wangemann to Europe, initially to ensure that the phonograph at the Paris World’s Fair remained in working order. After Paris, Wangemann toured his native Germany, recording musical artists and often visiting the homes of prominent members of society who were fascinated with the talking machine.
Until now, the only available recording from Wangemann’s European trip has been a well-known and well-worn cylinder of Brahms playing an excerpt from his first Hungarian Dance. That recording is so damaged “that many listeners can scarcely discern the sound of a piano, which has in turn tarnished the reputations of both Wangemann and the Edison phonograph of the late 1880s,” Dr. Feaster said. “These newly unearthed examples vindicate both.”

For the full story, see:
RON COWEN. “Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany.” The New York Times (Tues., January 31, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated January 30, 2012.)

“Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann used a phonograph to record the voice of Otto von Bismarck.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

The Economics of Intercollegiate Athletics

Here is more evidence that the role of athletics in higher education should be reconsidered. Another useful discussion occurs in the book by Christensen and Eyring. An earlier entry on this blog is also relevant.

(p. 230) The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics offers “College Sports 101: A Primer on Money, Athletics, and Higher Education in the 21st Century.” “In fact, the vast majority of athletics programs reap far less money from external sources than they need to function. Virtually all universities subsidize athletics departments through general fund allocations, student fees, and state appropriations, and the NCAA estimates in a given year that only 20 to 30 athletics programs actually generate enough external revenue to cover operating expenses. Institutional subsidies to athletics can exceed $11 million, according to data provided by the NCAA. With costs in athletics rising faster than in other areas of university operations, it is not clear how many institutions can continue to underwrite athletics at their current level . . . Rigorous studies of the subject, however, suggest that there is no significant institutional benefit to athletic success. . . . Indeed, donations to athletics departments may cannibalize contributions to academic programs. . . . There are two other myths to be dispelled. First, there is no correlation between spending more on athletics and winning more . . . Second, increased spending on coaches’ salaries has no significant relationship to success or increased revenue . . . October 2009, at 〈http://collegesports101.knightcommission.org〉.

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 227-34.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

The Knight Commission report can be downloaded at:
Weiner, Jay. “College Sports 101: A Primer on Money, Athletics, and Higher Education in the 21st Century.” Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2009.

The Christensen and Eyring book is:
Christensen, Clayton M., and Henry J. Eyring. The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2011.