building projects that marry form and function for both human and environmental needs

TO BE NOTED: From SA:

Slide Show: Top 10 Earth- and People-Friendly Buildings

The American Institute of Architects pick their top examples of building projects that marry form and function for both human and environmental needs

By Katherine Harmon

A HUMANE GREEN: Some eco-friendly buildings help inhabitants lead greener lives even after they've crossed the threshold. The Terry Thomas office building, seen here, is situated by a new streetcar line for commuters to use.
CREDIT: GABE HANSON

• Overview
  Slide Show: Top 10 Earth- and People-Friendly Buildings

Can a building be as easy on the environment as it is on the eyes? Without a doubt, says The American Institute of Architects (AIA), a professional association based in Washington, D.C. To prove it, for the past 12 years, the organization and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) have awarded the top 10 green projects across the globe.

At the same time, science is providing new ways to build green buildings—from using paints with low VOCs (volatile organic compounds) to high-efficiency ventilation—as well as revealing just how important a pleasing and healthy environment is to our interiors.

Of course, the devil is in the details, and as Scientific American Mind reported in its April issue, neuroscience is shedding new light on how constructed environments impact health and well-being. As it turns out, green buildings don't always put the humans who will be using them first. For instance, they're often, as we reported last week, downright noisy.

As a host of organizations and publications have created their own rankings of buildings based purely on eco-standards, the AIA has created a list of green buildings that also meet the aesthetic and functional needs of the people and communities that encounter and inhabit them. From a low-income apartment building situated by a light rail line to a new town center that reused materials from its old municipal buildings for construction, these projects are putting Earth and its residents on equal footing.

View a slideshow of AIA's top 10 green architectural projects worldwide

Irrationality is responsible for the economic mess we find ourselves in right now—irrationality plus greed,,,,, and a sub­stan­tial dose of ignorance

TO BE NOTED: From SA:

"Peter A. Ubel is professor of medicine and psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he explores the quirks in human nature that influence our health, happiness and society. He is author of the book Free Market Madness (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), which investigates the irrational tics that lead people to overbid on eBay, eat too much ice cream and take out mortgages they cannot afford. In an interview with Jonah Lehrer, Ubel explains how innate optimism, greed and ignorance can depress financial and physical well-being—and how individuals can commit to change.

Scientific American Mind: Your new book, Free Market Madness, argues that conventional economics, which assumes that humans are rational agents acting in their own self-interest, is deeply naive and scientifically unrealistic. Instead you describe a brain brimming with biases and flaws. Do you think these flaws are responsible for the latest economic turmoil? If so, how?

Peter Ubel: Irrationality is responsible for the economic mess we find ourselves in
right now—irrationality plus greed, of course, and a sub­stan­tial dose of ignorance. Let us start with ignorance. I am sad to say that many Americans have a difficult time with even simple math—around a third of American adults cannot calculate 10 percent of 1,000. People who struggle with concepts such as percents have an extremely difficult time with more complicated ideas, such as compounding of savings and, very relevant to our cur­rent crisis, adjustable-rate mortgages.

To make matters worse, most of us are hardwired for optimism. Ask us how we rate as drivers, and the vast majority of us are convinced we are above average—even those of us who have gotten into multiple car accidents. As a result of our unrealistic optimism, we are convinced that our incomes will rise fast enough to keep up with our outsized mortgage, or that our adjustable rate will not rise, or that our house’s value will indefinitely outpace inflation. We are social beings, too, and frequently judge our own decisions by seeing what other people are doing. If my neighbor added on a new kitchen with a home equity loan, I might assume that is a good idea for me, even if a more rational weighing of my finances would suggest otherwise. Even savvy financiers can get caught up in irrational impulses. If a competitor’s firm makes huge profits on risky loans, it is easy for me to push aside my fears about such risks: if he took those risks and was rewarded, maybe I overestimated the risks!

Mind: What can eBay teach us about human irrationality?

Ubel: eBay auctions help to reveal the rational and irrational forces driving consumer behavior. People are often quite rational, after all. Raise the price of a T-shirt, and generally, fewer people will buy it. Reduce the quality of a good, and you better reduce its price, too! But behavioral economists have analyzed eBay data to help identify some ways that consumers act irrationally. [For more on eBay and irrationality, see “Is Greed Good?” by Christoph Uhlhaas; Scientific American Mind, August/September 2007.] Offer a really low price for opening bids, a price everyone knows will not be the final selling price, and you nonetheless lure some consumers into making an initial bid. That increases the number of people bidding on the product, which makes it look more attractive, thereby generating even more bids. And then bidders, who knew the price would rise from their initial bids, get emotionally attached to the product and keep raising their offers. Now you know why it makes sense to tell people that bids for that Picasso hanging in your living room can start at $5!

Mind: You also argue that by taking our own irrationality into account, we can improve our health and well-being. Can you provide an example of a way to achieve such improvement?

Ubel: Precommitment! One reason we humans do not always behave rationally is that we have limited willpower. We know that exercise is good for us. We understand that junk food is bad. But we cannot follow through on our rational desires. We plan to run for 30 minutes, but after 10 we get off the treadmill and convince ourselves we are a bit stiff today. We try to cut down on empty calories and then grab a handful of M&Ms from a candy bowl, almost unaware of our action. No single M&M caused anyone to have diabetes. No one experienced a heart attack because he was 20 minutes short of his exercise goal. And yet our lives, our waistlines even, are the result of thousands of such decisions and behaviors.

To improve ourselves, we have to act as if each M&M matters, as if each decision has important consequences. To do this, it helps to make rules and follow them. Commit yourselves to no candy, no desserts, and you will become more mindful of M&M bowls. Run outside, rather than inside on a treadmill, and you will be forced to finish your running loop. Tell a friend you will walk with her for 30 minutes this afternoon, and you will be forced to show up. Do you want to save more money? Have some money automatically deposited into a savings account that you cannot access easily through ATMs, debit cards or checkbooks. Sometimes the best way to behave better when you are weak is to impose martial law on yourself when you feel strong.

Mind: Has your awareness of these innate flaws changed your daily routine?

Ubel: It has made me almost impossible to live with! Imagine spending time with someone who is obsessed with rationality, who constantly tries to find ways to “better himself.” My poor wife!

Mind: If you could give one piece of advice for avoiding a few of the mental mistakes outlined in your book, what would it be?

Ubel: None of us is perfect. We will all make a boatload of mistakes before our lives are done. So try to think about the areas in your life where you can least afford to make mistakes or where you must, simply must, remain steadfast in the face of temptation, and concentrate your energy and attention on these few areas. Is saving money your Achilles’ heel? Do not worry, then, that you might not always make great decisions on the tennis court. Is food your downfall? Try to minimize the food-related mistakes you make, and do not get bogged down trying to fix everything else in your life. Once you have mastered food (is that possible?), you can move on to the next challenge.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Explaining Fiscal Foolishness"."

There's a green gold rush on Capitol Hill.

TO BE NOTED: From SA:

Greenwire - March 19, 2009

Lobbyists Swarm Washington Touting Energy Ideas

With climate change and energy legislation in the works, lobbyists are lining up to influence the federal government's decisions

By Anne C. Mulkern

With Congress plowing toward legislation on energy and climate, lobbyists and their clients are swarming House and Senate offices. They are booking up conference rooms, shaking hands and submitting proposals for financial help and policy changes.

There are hundreds of hired guns now working on the energy issues. They represent a swath of diverse and sometimes conflicting interests, from small companies turning algae into oil to traditional utilities and big corporations, including Google, United Parcel Service and Safeway.

"What's happening in energy and carbon, what's being contemplated is nothing short of transformational," said Steve McBee, CEO of McBee Strategic Consulting, a lobbying firm with 31 clients interested in energy. Bills planned on energy and climate in Congress, he said, represent "an attempt to fundamentally shift the market."

"There's enough momentum and political will," McBee said, adding that Congress and President Obama "have a fighting chance of getting it done."

Momentum on changing energy policy began in the last two years, as state after state passed regulations promoting renewable energy. The private sector started shifting toward green power production, but that movement stalled with the economic crisis, several lobbyists and energy experts said. With credit dried up and venture capitalists ceasing investments, companies that need money for power projects are turning to the federal government.

Lawmakers besieged by ideas now must decide how to weigh requests and pick which are most aligned with their constituencies' needs and policy goals.

"What we're seeing is a very large number of clean energy companies and clean energy developers pursuing Congress and federal support in an effort to maintain the momentum that began 12 to 24 months ago," said Nick d'Arbeloff, president of New England Clean Energy Council, a trade group.

"It won't be an easy process for any of these companies to unlock dollars for their organization," d'Arbeloff added. "But a signal is being sent by the White House and by the Department of Energy that clean energy is a priority."

Companies and groups interested in energy and natural resources legislation spent nearly $355 million on lobbyists last year, up from $240 million in 2007, according to Congressional Quarterly's MoneyLine. That spending and the pool of people pleading their case are growing steadily this year as well.

Since January, 185 companies hired lobbyists to work on energy issues, MoneyLine records show. Even Fortune 500 companies that have long employed lobbyists on other issues have needed to hire more to track potential energy policy changes.

Established smaller companies want to shift toward clean energy. And new companies need help approaching lawmakers.

"We try to listen to everybody, because we know that there is no one single solution," said Anne Johnson, spokeswoman for Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "There's a lot of demand. There are a lot of people calling.

"We know that we have to look at these technologies while also looking at cleaner traditional energy."

With so many people knocking on their doors, lawmakers know they will ultimately write policies that will benefit some and exclude others. The goal, one said, is to avoid picking winners.

"It is our job here to set the signals right so we have a level playing field for these clean energy companies," said Rep. Jay Inslee, (D-Wash.), who sits on both the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

"Virtually any technology that has potential to be viable, they should have a seat at the table to move forward," Inslee said.

Outside experts from universities, including Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are helping lawmakers evaluate which proposals might be commercially viable.

"We're not just throwing darts here," Inslee said.

Wanted: 'game changers'

While lawmakers favor mature technologies that are proven and might work at a scale that could make them profitable in the future, Inslee said, Congress is also interested in innovative applications that could be "game changers," such as nanotechnology that would make solar cells more efficient.

Some lobbyists, including McBee, believe businesses with products or plans that are transformative are more likely to gain traction with Congress.

"There is a desire for real strategic change," McBee said. A key to success in this competitive market, he said, "is not wasting people's time with ideas that are incremental."

"Where the strike zone is is ideas that are mature, that are proven, that are bench-tested, but either capital or policy is needed to take it to scale," McBee added. "We are sort of actively seeking companies out that fit that bill."

Because of the congressional desire for big ideas, he said, traditional lobbying tactics like seeking help from old friends do not necessarily work.

"Great ideas transcend who it is you know, what it is your [political action committee] looks like," McBee said.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based company Better Place is working to persuade Congress that it has one of those revolutionary ideas. The company wants to build an infrastructure for charging electric cars. But the idea requires a shift in how electric cars would be sold and recharged.

New electric cars would be sold with exchangeable batteries, said Andy Davis, vice president of the clean energy team at McBee Strategic Consulting. Drivers would buy battery usage plans based on their driving amounts, similar to how cell phone plans work. They would use charging stations owned by Better Place.

States and cities have shown interest in the company's concept. The business has an agreement with the Israeli government to build infrastructure there, Davis said. In the United States, Better Place and its lobbyists are working on giving lawmakers information about its plan.

Moving from lab to marketplace

Others seeking help on Capitol Hill say they have proven technologies that need help moving to commercial scale.

PetroAlgae, a Melbourne, Fla.-based company, wants to build a demonstration plant to show that it can grow algae and turn it into oil. Such oil would not emit any carbon dioxide when processed and burned, said Patrick Von Bargen, director at lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates.

Algae grows on a diet of carbon dioxide, Von Bargen said, which makes the technology especially useful as Congress pursues policies to lower the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

The company, which has about 100 employees, hired Quinn Gillespie this month. PetroAlgae is seeking help applying for DOE grants created through the stimulus bill, Von Bargen said. The company also wants to make sure that future legislative definitions of biofuels are broad enough to include algae. A biofuel in general is fuel developed from plant material.

"One of the critical things that policymakers need to do, they need to be technology neutral," Von Bargen said.

MicroPlanet, a Seattle-based company that hired a lobbyist last October, wants help deploying a technology it says would help conserve power. Because the nation's electrical grid is inefficient, utilities send out more power than a customer actually needs to ensure that when the electricity reaches a home, it is at the required 114-volt level.

Using products installed outside a customer's home, MicroPlanet's technology keeps the power that goes into the house at 114 volts, said Noah Reandeau, lobbyist with Gordon Thomas Honeywell Government Affairs. Any additional power above 114 volts stays on the electric line, he said.

The technology has been deployed in nine countries, he said. In Washington, Reandeau said, "We're raising awareness of the fact that the technology exists."

As Congress moves toward a national requirement that utilities produce some power from renewable sources, Reandeau said, MicroPlanet wants to make sure that lawmakers consider voltage regulation as an option for meeting the mandate.

R&D assistance

Some companies that have hired lobbyists are looking for research and development help.

Lyman-Morse Boatbuilding, a Maine-based company, wants to use boat building technology to develop wind blades that could work on the Eastern Seaboard, where air currents can top 100 miles an hour. That requires a different kind of blade than one that works in Colorado or West Virginia, said Thomas Goldberg, the company's lobbyist.

Because the blades are more than 200 feet long, he said, the tip of the blade would spin much faster than the hub. Blades need a redesign to ensure they do not tear apart in the East Coast environment, Goldberg said.

"You have to have something that is significantly more robust," said Goldberg, who is with the American Technology Specialists lobbying firm.

The company wants money for R&D. Tax credits that recently passed are not as helpful, Goldberg said, because no investment banks are lending for renewable projects.

At the federal level, there is limited cash available and many businesses asking, Goldberg acknowledged. Members of Congress are asking sophisticated follow-up questions, such as requesting that a company provide more information on its product plan and assessments of its competitors' engineering designs.

"The number of people who want to come forward and claim that they can do this is increasing," Goldberg said. "You make your case on the merits."

Tracking bills, regulations

Lobbyists also are representing companies that say they are ready to go commercially with energy products but need help tracking congressional and Obama administration regulatory moves.

ADA Environmental Solutions, based in a Denver suburb, makes a product that reduces the mercury emitted by burning coal. The process uses activated carbon, similar to how water filters work, said President and CEO Mike Durham.

The company, which hired a lobbyist this month, is building a $400 million plant in Louisiana. It wants to build five more in other cities to meet demand from coal plants because 16 states have passed mercury-control regulations, Durham said.

"It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when bills in Congress would require mercury control at all power plants," Durham said.

In addition, Durham said, the company may want to compete for DOE grants for research on sequestering carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Cleaning coal of its greenhouse gas byproduct is a widely discussed idea but at this point unavailable at a commercial scale.

"The country has to invest in the technology," Durham said, "if they want to rely on this very secure fuel and reduce carbon emissions."

Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500"

“Rather, these forces themselves depend on certain propensities of the human mind.”

TO BE NOTED: From SA:

Creationism Feels Right, but That Doesn't Make it So

Psychological researchers suggest that evolutionary thinking is unnatural

By Jesse Bering

Presently I’m attending a small symposium on “Belief and Reason” at Trinity College, Cambridge, being sponsored by the Perrott-Warrick Fund. It’s a rather intimate affair with mostly cognitive scientists discussing the latest research and theory on everything from paranormal beliefs to free will to the placebo effect. One of the standout talks Monday was by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who gave a presentation titled “Is Religion Natural?” He focused on the puzzling case of creationist beliefs.

As Bloom pointed out, many people believe that one’s acceptance of evolutionary theory boils down to whether that person was indoctrinated as a child by religious parents or educated by science-minded teachers. But it's not that simple. By her own accounts, even Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind from nineteen months of age*, spontaneously pondered, “Who made the sky, the sea, everything?” prior to being taught how to communicate. As a retrospective anecdote, the example should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they say—but if true, it’s quite something, since her linguistic isolation meant that Keller hadn’t a culturally transmitted concept of God to revert to but nevertheless intuited ‘someone’ had created the world.

For the past decade, University of Michigan psychologist Margaret Evans has been investigating why creationist thinking comes more easily to the human mind than does evolutionary thinking. “Persistence [of creationist beliefs] is not simply the result of fundamentalist politics and socialization,” writes Evans. “Rather, these forces themselves depend on certain propensities of the human mind.” According to Evans, the preponderance of creationist beliefs—as well as their recalcitrance in the face of logical science—is due in large part to the way our cognitive systems have (ironically enough) evolved.

As a scientist, Evans isn't so much interested in the metaphysical question of ultimate origins, but rather in the cognitive factors that influence and constrain our ability to think and reason about this existential problem. In her very important research, she's been mapping out how children’s reasoning about origins are influenced by particular developmental experiences, such as being raised by a professor of evolutionary biology versus a pastor at the local church. Or, more commonly, just by regular parents.

Evans has discovered that regardless of their parents’ beliefs or whether they attend religious or secular school, when asked where the first member of a particular animal species came from (say, a fox or a turtle), 5- to 7-year-old children give either spontaneous generationist (e.g., “it got born there”) or creationist (e.g., “God made it”) responses. By 8-10 years of age, however, children from both secular and religious backgrounds give exclusively creationist answers. Typically these answers are manifest as “God made it,” but often “Nature” is personified, seen as a deliberate agent that intentionally made the animal. It’s only among the oldest children she’s studied, the 10-12-year-olds, that Evans uncovers an effect of developmental experience, with children of evolutionary-minded parents giving evolutionary responses and those of evangelical parents giving creationist answers to the question.

In one of her writings, subtitled “Why Creationism is Here to Stay,” Evans states that “the theory of evolution is not something that arises intuitively, but rather requires a specific knowledge structure.” In other words, thinking like an evolutionist is hard work because, ironically, it works against the grain of evolved human psychology. Evolutionists will probably never outnumber creationists, Evans believes, since the latter has a paradoxical ally in the way natural selection has lent itself to our species’ ability to reason about its own origins.

According to Evans and other psychologists, including Deborah Kelemen from Boston University, there’s a very specific cognitive glitch that invades our rationalist thought whenever we’re pondering the subject of life’s origins, something those who do research in this area refer to as “teleo-functional thinking” (reasoning about the functional purpose of an entity or object in question). When scratching our heads over an artifact—with the end product before us, asking ourselves how it came to be—these scientists find that we tend to start off by trying to deduce what it’s meant for. If you’ve ever puzzled over an ambiguous gadget at the Sharper Image or some archaic device at the antique store or museum, asking yourself, “I wonder what that’s supposed to be for?” this is an example of your teleo-functional reasoning in action. Many times the various physical or architectural features of the object, what are called its “affordances,” give us clues as to its inherent purpose, or in other words what the designer of the object had in mind when creating it. An object with a handle, for instance, is meant for holding, while one with a hook is meant for hooking, and so on, and we interact with the object accordingly.

One thing you may also have noticed is that when we can’t figure out the purpose of something to our satisfaction, it can be very, very frustrating. As a teenager, I once made the strangest archeological find in the trunk of a hundred-year-old shagbark hickory tree that grew in the backyard of my family’s house in Ohio. Since it was nearly dead anyway and, furthermore, in a state of suspended decline in the direction of our roof, my father decided to have the tree felled. Its remains were then butchered into firewood and stacked neatly on our lawn. It was in this stack of wood, while sorting for kindling one winter, that I discovered something curious among the tree’s ruins, a tool of some sort—two conjoining iron segments, one resembling an anvil with an opening at its rounded end for the pivot joint of the other to sit in. It had come to be wedged into the tree when the land was still owned by a hardworking farmer rather than a housing developer, and a thick hide of bark and lignum had consumed it in the time since.

I never did find out what that tool was supposed to be for, much less how it wound up in the belly of an old hickory tree. But why is it so irritating for me, to this day, to be deprived of this answer? It could be that, as University of California at Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik suggests, this object and its elusive purpose serves as something of a sexual tease for me, only it’s not walking in front of me semi-naked and giving me that come hither look insomuch as it’s wearing the cognitive chastity belt of a brainteaser.

Gopnik argues that human beings have evolved an “innate explanatory drive” that motivates us to seek explanations similar to the way we’re motivated to achieve sexual climax. That is to say, for the sheer thrill and phenomenological bliss of it. Just as those few seconds in bed or on top of the washing machine feel naturally grand and put a smile on your face, so too does lighting upon that fleeting eureka moment in solving a mind-tickling problem leave you glowing. (OK, so maybe doing crosswords or Sudoku isn’t going to have you exactly biting your bottom lip and moaning in ecstasy, but you get the gist of Gopnik’s analogy.)

Physiologically speaking, says Gopnik, your brain is rigged up to chase these short-lived moments of pleasure: orgasm in the one instance because sex is nature’s feel-good ruse to get your genes out there, and explanation in the other because knowing why things work the way they do enables you to learn and therefore to make more adaptive responses in the future. The thing is, Gopnik points out, your explanation doesn’t actually need to be correct to get that burst of pleasure; you’ve just got to believe you’ve solved the problem. In any event, unless I ever spend a Sunday afternoon googling images from a search of “agrarian tool history,” then I’m not going to get much satisfaction whenever I think about my 19th-century hickory-encrusted artifact.

One important point made by researchers working in this area is that teleo-functional reasoning invokes our social cognition because it has us guessing what the person who’d originally conceptualized the object intended it to be used for. “Oh I see,” we’ll say, rotating some mysterious contraption in our hands and finally recognizing some hidden function for one if its doohickeys or thingamajigs, “how clever.” Of course for artifacts, or for that matter anything intentionally manmade, this type of thinking makes sense. People are indeed very clever at designing new objects that have a functional purpose. In fact one could even say we’re ingenious at devising solutions to problems this way. Just over the past few decades, more than 600 original patents have been awarded for bidets and bidet-related accessories and 400 for products meant to improve your croissant-baking skills. But when applied to human origins, Darwin’s mindless machine of natural selection obviates the need for an intelligent designer. Somebody needs to explain this to Rick Warren—Stat!

As far as I know, the type of psychological research and theories described above haven’t been given much consideration in the endless ‘intelligent design’ debates eating up the clock at many lively school board meetings. But since it shows how our minds give the Book of Genesis a generous (and rather unfair) handicap in science education dialogue, it may be wise to table such findings for discussion.

In this new column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature. Sign up for the RSS feed or friend Dr. Bering on Facebook and never miss an installment again.

*Correction (3/20/09): When this story was originally posted, it incorrectly stated that Helen Keller was born deaf and blind."

Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott discusses some of the realities and speculations of time travel

TO BE NOTED: From SA:

"Steve: Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the seven days starting June 25th, 2008. I'm Steve Mirsky. This week on the podcast, Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott talks about presidential electoral polling, of course, as well as some fun thoughts about the realities of time travel. If you've listened to the past few episodes you know that Scientific American editor Mark Alpert has a new novel out called Final Theory. J. Richard Gott was Mark's advisor in college. I had heard he was working on polling data analysis, so when I ran into him at a party on June 10th to celebrate the publication of Mark's book, I asked him to talk a little bit about the polling work as well as his time travel thoughts. Toward the end, you will hear a third voice that's Scientific American editor George Musser.

Steve: Dr. Gott, tell me about this research that you've done in, of all things, election results and polling data.

Gott: Well, Wesley Colley and I decided that we would like to try to apply median statistics to polling to try to predict the electoral vote in 2004, and the reason for this is that the median is very good when you have different results and one of them might be discrepant. So, Zeldovich, the famous astrophysicist, once said that in Russia they didn't make watches very well, so when friends got together they would compare the time; and so, one would say "it's 5 minutes to 10" and the other would say "it's 10 o'clock" and the other one would say "it's 4:30," so they say take the median, take the middle line.

Steve: This is like the statisticians who go duck hunting. You must know that story as well.

Gott: What is that story?

Steve: Four statisticians go duck hunting, one shoots high, one shoots low, one shoots left, one shoots right and they all say, "We got him."

Gott: Yes, shoot in the middle. Take the median, this is what we did. So we applied this in 2004 and the interesting thing was [that]it, a lot of states, crucial states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida were too close to call in an individual poll. So there would be results like, "Bush is leading Kerry 49 to 47 percent in Ohio, but it is a 4 percent margin of errors, so Ohio is too close to call." They said all those three states were too close to call, but we just kept adding up who was winning in those states over a period of a month. And then you would find out that Bush was significantly ahead in Ohio, significantly behind in Pennsylvania, and Bush was significantly ahead in Florida. So those states were really locked up about a month ahead of time and they never changed. There wasn't any trend to go in on. So we were in the end, our method of just saying, "Bush ahead in a given state", well the prediction has the most polls, who is ahead in the number of polls, forget about the margins of error, forget about the average, calculating the averagejust ask who has the most wins in a given state. And that works too over the previous months, to give us all the states correctly except for one, which was Hawaii. So we calculated the electoral vote very accurately, and whereas many people thought the election was too close to call or Kerry might even have a victory, we correctly called it in advance.

Steve: Now how do two nice astrophysicists wind up getting involved in the gutter world of politics?

Gott: Well we would use these median statistics to investigate the question of the acceleration of the universe. The universe is expanding faster and faster and a team of scientists, two teams of scientists, had found this result. But we wanted to check to see whether it was true using the median statistics. They measured brightness of supernovae and they said that these supernovae that were seen too bright or too fade[faint] given in a cosmological model. And they found that the cosmological model they[that] fit them the best and the average was the accelerating model. But we wanted to check and see if that was true for the median, because it might be that a fewer of those supernovae were way off[center]setter and they were pulling the average up, so what we found was that it was true for the median as well. In other words, you needed that accelerating universe to fit the data for most of the supernovae; in other words, most of the supernovae were at the wrong brightness if the universe's expansion wasn't accelerating. And now it is an important confirmation of what they previously found using the average.

Steve: Why don't we just real click [quickly] explain the difference between the average and median for anybody who hasn't taken their statistics classes for quite a few years?

Gott: Well, in that example I gave, 5 minutes to 10 o'clock and 4:30, the average is slightly afternoon isn't? [That's]The average of those three times, but the median, the one in the middle, that's 10 o' clock and that's probably right.

Steve: Right, right. So your papers are not actually going to come out until shortly before the election, but it is getting some attention already.

Gott: That's true. Well, Neil Tyson took our method and he applied it to the current situation. He was interested in seeing how Obama would do versus McCain and how Clinton would do versus McCain, and if you gave the states to who was ahead in the median poll, you put states where you had no polls or ties, just the same way that they went in 2004, they were 19 states with new polls, and what they showed was that currently at that time Obama had 252 electoral votes and Mrs. Clinton would have had 295. This is somewhat surprising to people, I think, and we look to the similar set of data from like April 26 to May 26 over a month period. For example Mrs. Clinton was leading McCain three polls to nothing in Florida and leading two polls to nothing in Ohio. Obama was behind two to one in Ohio and behind in Florida three to nothing. He was also behind McCain in Michigan by three to nothing and McCain was tied with Mrs. Clinton, and so that it had been a Democratic state before so it went to her. We just did a recent update on this and I think Obama has, I think, he went up to 256 electoral votes. The close states are really Virginia which is not a tie, McCain had been leading two to one in that state, Obama is winning in Colorado, in Iowa, and both he and Mrs. Clinton winning the popular vote. So Obama is ahead in the popular vote, the median statistics say, and the electoral vote, although he is behindif he picks up a few of these states he could be aheadbut he is currently behind in Michigan which is the state that Democrats won before. So this also tells you where the candidates might profitably spend their time. So Virginia is a close state, Missouri is a close state, New Mexico Obama is ahead in, and he is not ahead in Nevada; so it tells you where they might campaign. One of the things that we noticed, a difficulty if you will, with the electoral system is that we noticed that the close states are inordinately important. The states last time of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, the candidates spent a lot of time there and they made like 80 some odd trips to these states, you know; and so the states like California, New York, Illinois, Texas, they hardly visited these states, maybe except to raise money. But all the interest in the campaigning is focused on the few close states where it might make a difference. So if it was just by the popular vote, the candidates would campaign all over the country, you know; but here in the electoral system, it is very important what happens in the close states and in the end you might have only two or three states that are really truly up for grabs. And if people get better at polling, using our method and others, well then they can rightly and will focus their attention on those key states. Indeed Obama has been recently to Virginia and so he knows that's an important state. We're putting this up on Wesley Colley['s] Web site; it is called www.colleyrankings.com. He is one of the several people that do computer rankings for the football teams that decides which team gets to go play in the national championship, so thiswithin a week or soI'm sure [we'll] put up an automated method that will show you the results as of that day and show you how the candidates are doing. You can see which of the states are up in the polls and which they are tied in and we will keep the total of the electoral voters that goes along and we can see whether it stays the same or it changes.

Steve: And how do you spell Colley?

Gott: C-o-l-l-e-y.

Steve: Colleyrankings.com?

Gott: Colleyrankings.com.

Steve: Interesting, now I want to switch gears. You've done some kind of fun writing about time travel and general relativity. So what's the bottom line on time travel? Are there time travelers among us, and they're keeping themselves secret?

Gott: Well no! That's what[one of] the interesting things we found out. Time travel seems to be possible in Einstein's theory of general relativity. It has a number of unusual solutions including the black hole solution, which you've heard about, the expanding universe solution, which you've heard about, but there are also solutions to Einstein's equations that allow time loops to occur, where you can circle back in time and visit an event in your own past and whether or not you can actually realize those solutions, we may need to know the laws of quantum gravity. We know how gravity behaves on large scales, on macroscopic scales, but we may need to know how gravity behaves on microscopic scales. This would be new physics that we haven't done yet. But Einstein's theory of gravity, which is general relativity, which is the best theory of gravity that we know, it does allow these time travel solutions. These are only like wormholes or cosmic strings. These are only solutions that supercivilizations could really even contemplate. And one of the things we learned about these solutions is that if you build a time machine by twisting space and time so you can circle back and visit an event in your past, you can use the time machine to go back before the time machine was created.

Steve: Really. That's pretty interesting.

Gott: So if you bend space and time up in the year 3000 so as to create a time loop, you might use it to go from 3002 back to 3001, which you can use it to come back to here, because that's before the time machine was invented. So the reason, it is a sufficient explanation for why you don't see any time travelers at the Kennedy assassination, filming that event in [a] white spacesuit, you know, you don't see that. You don't expect any time travelers to go back before the first time machine is even invented. We haven't invented one yet. So you don't expect to see any.

Steve: About 100,000 years from now, the place might be lousy with time travelers from a 100,003.

Gott: Yes, one of the things that can occur is that even though you inspect the past very carefully for time travelers and never find any, when you enter a time machine, suddenly a time traveler to the future can show up and say hello!

Steve: Interesting. Now in a real but possibly trivial sense, we are all time travelers right now, right?

Gott: Well, [in] one waywe are all are going towards the future. So, you can time travel towards the future fast. We know that this is possible. Einstein's theory of special relativity which he did in 1905, show[s] that moving clocks ticks slowly and so astronauts, the greatest time traveler we have so far, is an astronaut named Sergei Krikalev.

Steve: He has been circling very fast for months and months...

Gott: About 800 dayshe was in orbit going 17,000 miles an hour. So, he is right now a one forty-eighth of a second younger then he would have been if he had stayed home. So, that means that when he came back to the earth, he found that one forty-eighth of a second to the future of where he expected it to be. So this man has actually time traveled one forty-eighth of a second to the future.

Steve: Now we all do that to an incredibly infinitesimal event when he[we] takes a jet plane across the country.

Gott: That's true. It's just, you might get a few nanoseconds, you knowif you go around the world, on a trip around the world, thenthey've actually done this where they've sent a jet plane around the world, and when they come back it's about 50 billionths of a second to the future of where as it has aged 50 billionths of a second less. Now if you would go fast, faster: Let's say you went at 99.995 percent the speed of light, 500 light-years out to the [a] star [unclear 15:17], and then came back finally, the earth would be a 1,000 years older, and you will have aged 10 years. So this is how you can visit the world a 1,000 years [from] now. It's just very expensive.

Steve: And it's a one-way trip.

Gott: Oh! No, no, no! You can go out and come back.

Steve: No, I mean it's a one-way trip into the future.

Gott: Oh yes, yesto come back then you need one of those time loops. You actually need to twist spacetime, and this is possible as space and time are curved. So Magellan's crew left Europe and they went west, west, west around the earth and came back to Europe. This is impossible if the earth is flat but it is possible if the earth is curved. So with Einstein's theory of curves[d] space-time, so its loops coming back are actually possible; [but] we haven't built any one of those yet.

Steve: Good stuff. What are your, you have any personal time travel plans?

Gott: Well, people often ask me, "Well where would you go and visit?" Well, I would say, the past, what we already know [about] what happened in the past, so if you wanted to know what Cleopatra looked like, well actually there is picture of her on a coin, you know. So I would visit the future, so, and we know you can do that if you go fast enough. So, I would like to go about 200,000 years in the future and see what had happened to the human race, whether we are still around, whether we are extinct, or what we are up to!

Steve: And the first words you will say are "Get your hands off me, you dirty damned apes."

Gott: You could be in for a few real surprises!

Musser: Out of curiosity, if you then did that initial experiment where you went 1,000 years into the earth's future and you only age 10 yearsyou could take the entire earth, send it to [unclear 17:10] [the same star] and back and then you would finally be in sink [sync] again.

Gott: That's true. One of my students once wrote a science fiction story. I had them write science fiction stories based on real science and he said, "Well there would be [a] Broadway play: In the first act of [it took] place [in the present] and the second act took place 20 years later. They reassembled the actors, they too sent the audience off on a spaceship very fast and back so they only aged in days, and then they would see the second act and the actor is old. [Then] they would send the audience away again and bring them back, and then in the third, act the actors were 40 years older, so you could use it for that.

Steve: That's a Tony Award winner, no questions.

Musser: Absolutely.

Steve: J. Richard Gott also has done some thinking about using probability theory to estimate the length of time a particular thing or species will survive. There's a lot of interesting material on that in his Wikipedia entry. The June 6th Neal Tyson article that Gott mentioned was in The New York Times; just go to their Web site and search for Richard Gott and it comes right up; the article is called "Vote by Numbers". By the way if you go to the colleyrankings [site] you'll see that in the days after Gott and I spoke againwe spoke on June 10ththere was a big change in the electoral vote analysis based on swings in polls in Virginia and Ohio. Again the polling data is at www.colleyrankings.com.

Steve: Now it's time to play TOTALL....... Y BOGUS. Here are four science stories; only three are true. See if you know which story is TOTALL....... Y BOGUS

Story number 1: University of Florida Professor has designed what should be a working flying saucer.

Story number 2: Researchers have pinpointed the date of a solar eclipse described in Homer's Odyssey.

Story number 3: Half of the world's 24 million known chemical compounds fall within only 143 basic shapes.

And story number 4: The German cockroach is making a big comeback in urban environments.

Time is up.

Story number 1 is true. Florida engineering professor Subrata Roy has designed a prototype flying saucer. Electrodes on the surface would ionize the surrounding air into plasma; passing an electric current through the plasma would create force, which would in turn get you lift. So there would be no moving parts. You'll still lose your luggage.

Story number 2 is true. Researchers have used other astronomical clues in the Odyssey to pinpoint an eclipse mentioned in the epic to April 16, 1178 B.C. They published their report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For more, check out JR Minkel's article on our Web site. The Odyssey of course tells the story of Odysseus, [who] attempts to find Ithaca, which isn't easyjust ask anybody who went to Cornell.

And story number 3 is true. Half the known chemical compounds share only 143 basic shapes. That's according to a study in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. The author suggests that by evaluating compounds with shapes that fall outside the group of 143, chemists might discover novel rings, linkages, and atomic groupings with potential applications in medicine or materials.

All of which means that story number 4, about the German cockroach making a big come back is TOTALL....... Y BOGUS, because the German cockroach didn't have to make a big comebackit's going strong. It's the roach commonly found in homes, however; a couple of days ago I evicted an American cockroach from my house. The Humongous American cockroach keeps German cockroaches as pets. I captured the roach in a large jar and put it out in the street where [it] carjacked the Mini Cooper some Web searching turned up that fact that the American cockroach really prefers the South for its hot weather and that citing [sightings] in New York City, where I live, though not rare or not [aren't] all [that] common either. So with global warming; we can perhaps look forward to gigantic roaches in more of our homes.

Now I'll tell you another cockroach story. There was a great researcher named Berta Scharrer. She used the American cockroach as her research subject and the American cockroach from the tip of the antenna to the back end, it's got to be a good three inches longand I based that on my personal observations this week. So Berta Scharrer was working with American cockroachesthis is back in the 1940sand there was a cockroach infestation in the building in which she worked. It was an infestation, however, of German cockroaches. Nevertheless, the all-male faculty blamed Berta for the infestation despite the fact that the species that she worked on was not the species that infested the building, just one of the things that she had to deal with being a woman scientist way back then.

(music)

Well that's it for this edition of the weekly SciAm podcast. Visit http://www.SciAm.com for the latest science news, videos and slideshows and sign up for the daily digest at http://www.SciAm.com/daily, I did. For Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, I'm Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us."

the implicit prediction that we would see a blossoming of enforcement energy in a market bust - after most of the damage has been done

From The Baseline Scenario:

"Bernie Madoff Day

with one comment

As Bernie Madoff goes to his reward today, we should be asking how this could have happened. Not only Madoff and Allen Stanford, but also dozens of “mini-Madoffs” have been unearthed since the market collapse in September and October, which seems to have reminded the SEC that it has an law enforcement function. Not surprisingly, regulators are ramping up their enforcement divisions, and Congressmen are planning legislation to increase enforcement budgets.

A little late to close the barn door.

While Christopher Cox, SEC chairman from 2005 until this January, makes an obvious target, there is a deeper phenomenon at work than just the Bush administration’s hands-off attitude toward corporate fraud (an attitude largely shared by the Clinton administration). That is the general tendency of people - investors and officials alike - to underestimate the risk of fraud during a boom and overestimate the risk of fraud during a bust.

This issue is discussed in a paper by Amitai Aviram published in my own school’s Yale Journal on Regulation (but since you can’t get it from their website, get it from SSRN).

Aviram’s first point is that people tend to ignore fraud risk in good times and worry about it in bad times. There are many reasons for this. Falling asset values and credit crunches make it harder to perpetuate certain types of fraud, such as Ponzi schemes, but there are other factors. In one form of cognitive bias, people ascribe good outcomes to their own investing “skill,” and bad outcomes to exogenous factors they cannot be blamed for, such as fraud. The discovery of a few well-publicized instances of fraud creates an availability bias, where people miscalculate the incidence of fraud.

Typical enforcement patterns only exacerbate this cycle. According to Aviram, the traditional academic model of enforcement is that you set a budget such that, at the margin, the marginal cost of enforcement equals the marginal benefit of enforcement. In practice, however, this model is affected by political pressures. In a boom, when the public underestimates the risk of fraud, there is no percentage in presenting yourself as a crusader against big corporations or Wall Street - especially when they are being portrayed in the media as heroes, as Enron was prior to 2001. But in a bust, the way to score political points is to go after the “crooks and robbers,” which is especially convenient after they have been pointed out to you by the markets (Enron, Madoff). This leads to underenforcement during the boom and overenforcement during the bust. (Or, I might say, severe underenforcement during the boom and maybe sufficient enforcement during the bust.)

Here’s what this looks like:

That’s the annual percent change in the S&P 500 plotted against the annual percent change in the number of SEC enforcement actions. I would have liked to see a regression, or at least a correlation, but this is a law paper, after all.

So, yes, it’s the fault of regulators who are too soft on industry, but they also share the misperceptions of the public at large, which wants to believe that everything is just fine when the market is going up. Of course, regulators are supposed to know more than the public at large.

Aviram has a discussion of the role of conspicuous law enforcement itself in reinforcing or counteracting these misperceptions. This discussion is wishy-washy, because he leaves open the question of whether conspicuous law enforcement increases or decreases risk perceptions. (Again, this is a law paper - no equations and few numbers, just concepts.) But I think it’s pretty clear that it decreases risk perceptions. Let’s put it this way: On the day that you learned about Bernie Madoff, did you feel more secure because you felt like the SEC was doing a good job protecting you? Or did you feel less secure because if Madoff could get away with it for so long, who else could? Let’s assume I’m right and then follow Aviram’s reasoning. In that case, this cyclical enforcement pattern makes things even worse, because the lack of enforcement during good times makes people feel even more secure, and the “over” enforcement in bad times makes them even more paranoid. Therefore, he concludes, enforcement should be expressly counter-cyclical, which requires insulating the regulators from public pressure to be lax during a boom.

Thus, when conspicuous law enforcement increases risk perception [my assumption], implementing the correct long-term policy will cause fear and anger among the public in the short term. Nonetheless, if the goal of anti-fraud laws is to maximize long term efficiency, the public’s immediate sentiments should not be a consideration for abandoning the optimal (long-term) policy. In fact, the law enforcer should be shielded from precisely these short-term pressures.

Aviram cites central banks as an example of an institution that is appropriately counter-cyclical. But let’s not fault him for that. The paper was first written in early 2007, and few people could have foreseen what happened since. Indeed, the implicit prediction that we would see a blossoming of enforcement energy in a market bust - after most of the damage has been done - turns out to have been dead-on.

Written by James Kwak

March 12, 2009 at 2:05 pm"

Me:
Have you ever heard of a Ponzi Scheme being stopped as soon as it began? I doubt it. That’s because it mirrors a particularly lucrative investment for quite a long time. How many people are going to let you close down there investor because you suspect that his returns are too high? They’re more likely to respond that you’re high.

There’s no stopping a Ponzi Scheme until it runs its course. It’s a perfect crime for a fairly long time. Also, notice, Madoff admitted his guilt. Stanford isn’t so stupid it seems. He doesn’t believe that the government can even figure out how a Ponzi Scheme works, let alone convict him of running one. He might turn out to be right.

I suggest reading this post from Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=limits-on-human-comprehension&print=true

“David H. Wolpert, a physics-trained computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, has chimed in with his version of a knowledge limit. Because of it, he concludes, the universe lies beyond the grasp of any intellect, no matter how powerful, that could exist within the universe. Specifically, during the past two years, he has been refining a proof that no matter what laws of physics govern a universe, there are inevitably facts about the universe that its inhabitants cannot learn by experiment or predict with a computation. Philippe M. Binder, a physicist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, suggests that the theory implies researchers seeking unified laws cannot hope for anything better than a “theory of almost everything.”

Perhaps with Ponzi Schemes, we’ve simply run up against the limits of human knowledge.