We are not alone

Today we travel! Not to Cork but to the limits of the detectable universe. We used to think that man was crafted in the image of god and given dominion over all he surveyed. That legitimised the subjugation of women, eating of animals, and a general feeling that, if you had XY chromosomes, two legs and ten fingers you were the centre of the universe. I wrote about how, four hundred years ago, Galileo shook this quaint conceit rather sharply when he realised that the planet Jupiter was not a speck of light circling somewhat eccentrically round the Earth. It was, au contraire, a world of its own with more moons than we had.  That was a bit of a shock but we assimilated the information and readjusted the story while continuing to sack the planet to supply us with toys and grossly inappropriate food-stuffs. The 20th century saw us relegated further and further from the centre: of the solar system, of the galaxy, of the universe. That was because better instruments, better theory and better algorithms enabled us to accumulate data about what was out there beyond the atmosphere.

Mina Fleming and Annie Jump Cannon, girl-astronomers of quite shocking dedication and insight processed the data in ways that helped predict how far, how big and how hot was each pinpoint of white on a million photos of the dark night sky.  From these catalogues of stars Frank Drake could calculate how many of the stars were sufficiently sun-like that we could imagine them supporting some sort of life on a planet nearby. But in 1961, Drake just had to wave his arms vigorously to estimate how many of the sun-like stars might have planets. Our well-planetted solar system might be boringly typical or deeply different but with a sample of one we had no way of getting better information. In 1992, a generation after Drake, Wolszczan and Frail found evidence of something whirling round a pulsar that might be a planet.  But as Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been pointing out since she discovered pulsars LGM-1 and -2, being up close and personal with a pulsar is far too extreme to encourage life-as-we-know-it: the emitted radiation would make your hair stand on end.

The real break-through came exactly 20 years ago today when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz at the University of Geneva revealed the existence of a planet in orbit round the star 51 Pegasi [R for red in the bottom left corner of the square made by α, βand γ Pegasi and α-andromedae]. These are known more romantically by their Arabic names of Markab the saddle; Al Sā’id/Scheat the upper arm; Algenib and Alpheratz/Sirrah. 51 Pegasi was a 'main-sequence' [ie normal] star about 50 light-years distant and although its planet was much larger than Earth, it seemed possible that life could exist on or near its surface.  The tools available to Mayor and Queloz meant that only big star-gravity-perturbing exoplanets were capable of being detected. As techniques and equipment have improved over the last 20 years, these 'hot Jupiter' lumps are found to be the exception not the rule.

About 2000 planets have been convincingly demonstrated by a variety of clever detection methods requiring a knowledge of physics that is beyond me.  One way is to detect a separate infra-red [hot] source of light next to a star. This is like trying to distinguish a warm baked bean from a searchlight 50m away from a spot at the edge of the solar system. The other method relies on the fact that planets do not rotate about their star; both objects rotate about their collective centre of gravity. You can pick up the doppler shift of the light as the star is swung in to and from the observer by its minute rotating partner: think an enormously fat man man being swung around by a new-born kitten. Doubtless the methods used to detect these remote and tiny fluctuations in light are being used to track your every movement by The Man's all-seeing-eye geostationary satellite.

Just like we should see the arrival of a couple of thousand Syrian and Somali refugees in Ireland as an opportunity rather than a threat, we should view the increasing likelihood of Life Out There as exciting and intriguing. Bring on the Little Green Men, we'll see how good they are at drumming.

QALYs for normal people

Two days ago I was on about utilitarianism and am naive enough to believe that governments can optimise the public good by rational decisions about who to tax and where to spend. But only by believing that all their citizens (black, female, blind, very small and very old included) are equal. QALY utilitarianism really doesn't work for individuals because we are all human. Even with my blunted affect I'm with E.M. Forster “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”. One of the theoretical bases of altruism is the concept of inclusive fitness: we'll make a sacrifice to benefit those with whom we have genes in common. JBS Haldane [previously] claimed that he would risk death by drowning to save two brothers or eight cousins: we'll naturally do more for our own children than a random black kid languishing in another country.  And I'm mildly aggravated by people who manifest the Illusion of Control by trying to manage their lives/careers to achieve a specific goal. If you feel passionately about that goal then, almost by definition, you haven't subjected it to a cold rational cost-benefit analysis. If you want an internal debate about the morality of altruism, there is a longish piece in the Grauniad about giving money to strangers instead of spending it on [more] stuff for self. I'm afraid I flung it across the room: you can over-think things.

But hyper-rational MacAskill is not above offering life-coach advice from the perspective of one who is not close to being half-way through his. Here he speaks at TEDx to tell school- or college-leavers how they can best manage their lives if they have bleeding-heart tendencies. Taking a gap-year to go South and build huts for Africans is a waste of time and talent!  You would do better to do one or more of the following.

• Become an entrepreneur or get up close to one. Entrepreneurs have to be generalists, so they upskill on a broad range of topics. The Beloved lucked into an office-help job with Clive Sinclair as the 8th hire at his ZX80 venture in Cambridge, UK. Two years later she was Customer Service North America in Boston, MA.
• Go into research. The market for researchers is under-supplied and the training is somewhat generic - if you can find out how a gene works you can find out whether compulsory Latin has benefit in primary schools or why dams fail.  And you'll be able to discover where is the best place to dispose of your disposable income.
• Go into politics.  Especially if you're at Oxbridge and have some rich friends: that cohort has a 1/30 chance of ending up in parliament.
• Upskill yourself. You'll be better off, and so will the poor, if you work for a year as an intern in a consultancy in Washington or Uppsala than if you wield a hammer in Ouagadougou.
• Get a job in Megacorp and climb the corporate ladder. You don't have to put all your earnings into cocaine and Porsches.

80000 hrs gives a parallel list of career advice. And offers a quiz to help you down the right path.

But one final thing - take this advice with a pinch of salt. MacAskill accepts, with minor qualification, the idea that Norman "Short Wheat" Borlaug saved a billion many lives.  I profoundly disagree.  One thing that would help us all [I'm speaking for oaks and ants and oafs as well as Oxbridge graduates] is fewer people.

Tripadvisor, Cork

If you have a bare 24 weekend hours to spend in Cork, the second city of our noble republic, you may like some advice about how to get the mostest of the bestest for the leastest.

• Send one of your number in to the English Market, preferably before it gets busy at 10am.  Don't go mad for meat or potatoes; just pick a selection of wannabe French patisseries: a couple of croissants, ditto pain-au-chocolate, a Danish pastry or two. Preferably purchase from more than one source, that way you can choose the best available the next time: On The Pig's Back, Heaven's Cakes, the Alternative Bread Company. For good measure and better for your teeth, buy a baguette-shaped loaf made with a generous proportion of rye Secale cereale flour. Have another member of the party get up really early and make a plain white sweet-yeast loaf containing a tablespoon of organic poppy Papaver somniferum seed. Make sure that both tea and coffee are available ad lib for brunch.
• In the early afternoon head East to Midleton and then turn South towards Cloyne and Ballycotton.  Pay attention to the spirit of Bishop Berkeley when  passing through Cloyne, the seat of his see; and watch out for falling trees! Stop at Ballymaloe House to deal with the copious amounts of tea consumed at brunch. Do some kit shopping the the kitchen shop attached the the house, purchase a red enamel tea-pot and some other kitchen paraphernalia.  Sit outside on a frail wooden bench in the thin Autumn sunshine. Reflect on life being full of simple pleasures.  Do not stop to eat in a place world famous for the quality of its kitchen. No rather . . .
• . . . carry on to the tiny fishing village of Ballycotton looking for chips. Stop opposite the Post Office for fish&chips at Skinny's.  Order a regular serving of fries because you know that eating a lot at lunchtime makes you, the designated driver, fall asleep in the afternoon. Realise with dismay that the regular fries is enough to feed two; speculate about the size of people who order a large chips. Eat all the fish that is too much for people who ordered it. Don't forget a deep-fried Mars bar.
• Check out any or all of the Ballymaloe Cookery School, Stephen Pearse's Shanagarry Pottery [R above], The Kilkenny Design outstation warehouse. Then head back to town.
• After more tea at Dau.II's gaff and some judicious jumping up and down to settle the fish & chips, head out to the Market Lane Restaurant for dinner.  Be sure to order whatever is the chef's special (when we were there it was Blasket Island slow-cooked lamb-shanks cooked till the merest touch will fall the meat off the bone). The slow cooked West Cork ham-hock is larger, cheaper and pinker. Don't forget to ask for a doggy-bag to take home the half which you were unable to finish - that will be sandwiches for tomorrow's lunch. For the craic-which-is-mighty, make sure you order the taster-tray from Elbow Lane Craft Beers next door: a stout, an ale, a lager and a Weissbier each in a dinky tumbler.  When you've decided which you like best, order a pint to wash down the food.
• Sleep in Dau.II's apartment rather than in the hotel along the quay. That way you can start eating again as soon as you wake up.

Your mileage may vary but it worked very well for us; that was a pretty good day.

To Do Good

I think I'd be correct in stating with confidence that "all readers of The Blob desire to do good".  Even if the grandson of Josef Mengele is tuning in from his fastness in the Paraguayan jungle, a case could be made that Opa Josi firmly believed he was carrying out important medical research.  If we're going to Good, there's no point in piffling about at the fringes; we should aspire to do the most good possible with the resources that are available to us. A smart young chap called William MacAskill is making waves in plunging towards this goal of quantifying altruism. He's got his own website and and is now a Fellow at Emmanuel College Cambridge and also an associate professor at Lincoln College, Oxford.  He's just published a book Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference, which is comprehensively reviewed by Amia Srinivasan in the LRB. You should read it, ideas are developed there that I don't touch on here.  MacAskill, is a disciple of Peter Singer an experimental ethicist who has forced us to think about the utility of compassion. Singer is fond of pointing out that we would happily ruin a $700 suit wading into a muddy pond to save a drowning child but won't shell out $7 to immunize one on the other side of the Third World.

Last Summer I confessed to being a Naive Utilitarian, with similar trepidation as people who admit to supporting a rubbish soccer team (Arsenal springs to mind) or liking the music of Blur. I've also filled The Blob with examples of quantification and statistical analysis with no more existential justification than that if numbers are there then they deserve to be analysed. Therefore I am predisposed to like an attempt to quantify or optimise an ethical issue like altruism or effective giving.  But I also know that ethics is hard (having failed the Ethics Quiz) and that a superficial analysis of altruism is going to be annoying. Worse than annoying, because it's going to queer the pitch for other would-be rationalists.

Amia Srinivasan has digested enough of MacAskill's book so that I don't feel a burning need to run off and buy it.  But if any close family member is stuck coming up to Christmas ...?  MacAskill and another Oxbridge philosopher Toby Ord have pledged to cap their income (at about £20K) and give the rest to charity for their entire working life.  Ord has founded Giving What We Can while MacAskill has launched 80,000 Hours which is about what your paid working life will be if you survive to 65.  GWWC has apparently raised $400 million in pledges since its launch six years ago. But we all know that some charities deliver more of your cash to the deserving than do others. When Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 he pledged to donate the money to “a well-known young American author and his family, to enable him to continue writing” [himself].  You can check out a number of meta-charities like Give Well to see who has the fewest 4x4 vehicles and desk-bound fund-raising VPs.  Forbes sorts US charities on the basis of charitable commitment [how much of your $$$ goes to Africa] and fundraising efficiency [how much it costs to get your $$$].  So that's one element of efficient giving.

But the impact of your $$$ can also be quantified. All your money can be given to ensure that every child in Africa has a pencil with which to get educated OR you can stop any child ever again being infected with hookworm Ancylostoma duodenale. You're too late to do that for smallpox, we've done smallpox.  This is where QALYs quality-adjusted life years come in.  I mentioned the idea in connexion with hepatitis back in July. QALYs are useful for allocated resources among competing claims on a finite cash-pot. Is it better to make triple-bypass heart-surgery available to all at government expense or build gyms in every school in the country (and ban the sale of cream-cakes)?  You can do research to find out how much the quality of life is improved over how many years by these two alternative interventions and then make an informed allocation at budget time.  The example in the LRB review says that life with AIDS is so grim [with constant infection and weird tumours popping up every third Thursday] that your QALY is 0.5 compared to happy healthy me with a QALY 1.0. Giving antiretroviral therapy can a) extend life expectancy but also b) crank up that QALY to 0.9. There are all sorts of problems with QALY - like having to ask Jo[e] Patient how s/he feels having contracted condition X rather than using an objective criterion. For example, people actually on dialysis rate their well-being higher than people who merely imagine being in the hospital getting filtered twice a week. Having established your QALYs, scaling up to the whole population is only elementary maths.

What we want to avoid is decisions being made, consciously or unconsciously, by fat old white men who want to get re-elected. We also want to avoid damn-fool ideas like buying expensive/glamorous pieces of kit or opening [requires Minister, ribbon, scissors, constituents and the press] new state-of-the art centres-of-excellence rather than dribbling out the money in unsexy but highly effective initiatives . . . like breakfast clubs for dirt-poor children.  I think QALYs work if you are an uncorrupt government whose brief is to maximise the well-being of The People.  It is pure greatest good for the greatest number utilitarianism in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.  But it requires The Man to be as sternly uncompromising as any stoic Roman consul ordering the death of his own son.

Feverfew

I was alerted by Metafilter to a wonderful information rich graphic sorting the evidence for the efficacy of various dietary supplements. The graph is entitled Snake Oil Supplements, not least because it is distinctly bottom-heavy.  There is loads of products [see R] below the possibly useful line, outnumbering the things which have a chance of doing something useful. As Dara O'Briain says, "the parts of herbal medicine that work have become medicine and the rest is a nice bowl of soup and some pot pourri".

But up the top was a small circle (ie. not of great interest to 'the public' or 'science') for feverfew Tanacetum parthenium which if you follow the links through to the Cochrane Index, appears to reduce the number of migraine attacks by 0.6 per month. According to this (not massive) controlled study, if you consume this herb, you'll have 6 fewer migraine in a year. That sound like a lot and we have stands of the stuff growing in our polytunnel at the other end from the poppies.  The French call it Pyrèthre doré but the Germans say fieberkraut like the Anglophones.  Spanish has a whole clatter of different common names including hierba santa. The Cochrane Index is the GoTo place for evidence for the safety and efficacy of drugs, treatments and medical practice.  If The Index gives something even a qualified Yes, you should pay attention.  Seems that a suitable dose regime is 2 or 3 feverfew leaves every day as a prophylactic against migraine.  If you want to take a bit for arthritis, fevers, muscle tension, lower blood pressure, stomach irritation, to improve kidney function, colitis, dizziness, tinnitus or menstrual problems, you work away but there is NO evidence of efficacy against those conditions.  You'll probably get similar benefit making a tisane from the packaging in which your feverfew tea-bags are sold.

Data prevents injury

Good stuff.  I had a narrow gap between two classes at noon yesterday so was able to hear a visiting speaker pitching at the Sports Science side of our Department. It's barely a week since we had the last external speaker talking with bounce and clarity about turning kids from sacks into six-packs. If this level of inspiration keeps up, I'm going to start running . . . between the fridge and the sofa. Yesterday, it was Stephen Smith, a graduate from our Sports Rehabilitation degree about 8 years ago. He admitted to have been a less than stellar student here, especially when it came to number-crunching. That is just bonzer because he's done well for himself and that will buck up some of our struggling students. He left college looking for work as a coach and fitness expert and found that he and his opposite numbers were making observations and delivering recommendations in a way that seemed to be wholly unreproducible seat of the pants stuff based on 'experience' and tradition.

He then started off on a mammoth three year study to measure what could be measured in an effort to find predictors of injury. Preventing injury is big money in sports because if your stars are man-down with a sproinged hamstring you don't win the match and your corporate sponsors look elsewhere. In US NFL pro-football the bill for injury is $500+ Million a year; more for baseball. Even with 64 independent variables clocked in numerous athletes, however, Smith couldn't find any variable or combination of variables which explained the distribution of subsequent injury.  It's a bit like predicting obesity from a mammoth population genome-wide association study GWAS: each fat person is over-weight because a particular set of circumstances that will be different from the guy on the next door treadmill at weight-watchers. It's also possible that using GWAS to look for mutations across the human genome to predict obesity is looking in the wrong haystack - try looking at the intestinal flora instead! Having shed-loads of data which is unable to offer any insight is galling but not uncommon in science. Smith & Co. took their data to the Head of Stats at TCD who set a couple of PhD students on it and they advised 'machine-learning' approaches for future work.

In the old days [2005?!], you'd have to ask each athlete how much they could stretch or bend in the directions demanded and that sort of data was more-or-less useless - biased, fuzzy and unreliable. As well as getting a better statistical foundation, Smith and his partners looked to develop an App which would grab motion-capture data [L] in an efficient, objective manner. That needed ca$h and they were able to pull down $4million in Silicon Valley venture capital to float Kitman Labs in October 2012. From three employees three years ago, they now have 30 people of the pay-roll! A key piece of kit is a single high-def camera coupled with a depth sensor [L] that can capture the 3-D location of various joints (knee, shoulder, ankle, hip etc.) to a precision of 0.5cm. That's extraordinarily elegant and parsimonious: a typical rival set would require 6-8 cameras and a slab of software to integrate the information. They also slid their test-subjects into an MRI scanner so that they can extrapolate reliably from the video-captured external surfaces to the actual joints within. By taking measurements of the distance between shoulder-elbow and elbow-wrist you can infer the position of the elbow joint even when, say, the fist occludes direct line of sight.

And it is lickedy-spit: you can put an entire rugby team including substitutes through their paces before a training session taking 60-90 seconds each. While the lads are running intervals or practicing line-out strategy on the field, the boffins in the club house can identify the members of the team who most need work from the fitness trainers. They can tell, for example, if the full-back is favoring his left leg when doing a standing jump for the camera. That should be worked on: asymmetry is a flag for stress.  But the ease of data capture also allows longitudinal studies. If the full back is favoring his left leg today but not last week you might want to pull him off the field right now to rest it.  The longitudinal information incorporates reports from each athlete about sleep-deficit, diet, 'well-being' and other issues that might impact on stress and so be likely to result in injury.  That exposes some interesting variation among people: some are steady-as-you-go tug-boats through life: sleep eight hours every-night, happy in their own skins, regular in their habits and clockwork in their bowel-movements.  A small-small glitch in one parameter for those people is an orange-light warning. Others are racing yachts - caught in the doldrums one day and romping home with the wind abaft the next. Their mood-swings have also to be accommodated by team-mates and management.

We live in a data deluge. Kitman Labs seem to be doing something interesting with it all.  One aspect of their business package is that they undertake to integrate all the relevant information which has been traditionally kept in separate file-cabinets: the team doctor releases nothing because of medical confidentiality; the coach is dyslexic and has no written records; the team are allowed to self-report their alcohol consumption; omerta rules on grassing up your team-mates. Break all those impediments down and put everything into a gurt big computer and you might get some replicable data. And throw those stool samples into the hopper too!

A coherent life

Two days ago I read a long form article in the Atlantic that was just smashing and after the first couple of paragraphs I looked at the author's name - Alison Gopnik - and said Gopnik . . . Gopnik . . . I've heard of her: she must have done something impressive.  But I was really conflating three separate Gopniks:

• Alison whom I couldn't actually remember having encountered
• Adam who writes for the New Yorker with a fluency and easy erudition that half makes me wish I had a subscription to the magazine.  He wrote, for example, an insightful and critical piece about Harper Lee's deus-ex-machine prequel/sequel to 'Mockingbird' this June.
• Myrna who was one of the authors on the Nature paper about FOXP2 which caused such a hullabaloo in 2001. Over three generations half of a family of Bangladeshi-Londoners displayed weirdly specific developmental speech deficiencies which turned out to segregate precisely with a mutation in the transcription factor FOXP2. It was hailed as "the human speech gene" by a Press who was incapable of conveying scientific breakthroughs with any insight, background or subtlety.

It turns out that they are all members of the same family. Myrna is an emeritus professor of linguistics at McGill University in Canada and the others are two of her five children. Adam's webpage quotes with approval from Harper Lee's book Go Set a Watchman: "Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and would probably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read to Jem and Jean-Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children grew up possessed of an obscure erudition. They cut their back teeth on military history, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, True Detective Mysteries,The Code of Alabama, the Bible, and Palgrave's Golden Treasury." That gave me a frisson of recognition because that's a bit like we treated Dau.I and Dau.II when they were educating themselves at home. We took no prisoners when it came to language or ideas: lots of stuff was batted around the kitchen table but we never hauled our wind or talked down to them. And they were not slow to tell me I were talking nonsense. I suspect that's what it was like in the Gopnik household in Montreal: two Professors and a parcel of bright and eager kids reading anything and talking about everything.

Turns out that Alison the firstborn was trained as a philosopher - D.Phil, Oxford under Jerome Bruner.  We have a copy of Bruner's The Process of Education on the shelf where we keep our education, home, important books: "knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it." As it happens it's Bruner's 100th Birthday today and he's still with us as a Senior Research Fellow at NYU. At college Gopnik read all the philosophers, because she could: it's a field much more limited than, say, science where nobody since Henri Poincaré has been able to read/know everything and he's been dead 100 years. It's a man's world is Philosophy, more so than engineering or physics, and it was really difficult for Gopnik to reconcile her ambition to be a hot-shot philosopher with a genuine and consuming interest in children. It was all too easy to get written off as "a girl" if she was interested in such dull, light-weight creatures who were sporadically incontinent and couldn't spell Kant let alone Teilhard de Chardin.

But Gopnik achieved the reconciliation by morphing from the philosophy of the mind to cognitive psychology and starting to make profound observations and design nifty experiments to open a window on the minds of children. By structuring the investigative situation just-so and being prepared to be surprised, she and her students and colleagues were able to devise hypotheses about such seemingly nebulous concepts as empathy and the sense of self and then test them. The non-verbal responses they elicited from pre-verbal children were reproducible and general. One concept that acquired legs was the idea that these kids were Bayesian in their thought processes: perpetually modifying a series conditional probabilities to get to grips with the world.  Because they know nothing, children are always trying things out to see if some solution will work or such a theory has explanatory power. This has become known as Gopnik's Theory Theory, the idea that kids are constantly developing theories and testing them against reality. A theory is a not a random punt, life is too short and potentially dangerous for that; it is an idea informed by previous experience. When they get to school all that is stopped; in 'science' they are no longer allowed to find stuff out for themselves; they are required to absorb the corpus of knowledge laid down in text books and religiously repeat the experiments [attaching weights to springs and rolling things down inclined planes] that laid down The Laws. If you stop and look with attention, you'll have to accept that children, far from being rather dull and often noisy and demanding, are in fact far more interesting, engaged and thoughtful than almost any adult. Particularly they are generalists not specialists. The process of education seems to be a steady process of knocking the sparkle and inquisitiveness out of us so that we finish up dull, dull, dull and only good for mowing the lawn at the weekends.  Check out Alison Gopnik's TED talk How Babies Think.

Mais revenons a notre Atlantic long-form! One of the philosophers that Gopnik read with empathy and affection in college was David Hume who wrote A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 before he was 30. Reading it in college in the 1980s, she realised that this was an important contribution to our understanding of ourselves, not least because Hume denied the existence of 'Self'. Re-reading ATOHN after a couple of decades in California, Gopnik realised that Hume seemed to be channeling the Buddha in several of his key ideas. Not since the Name of the Rose has there been such a gripping yarn from the groves of academic philosophy. It's got all the ingredients: old manuscripts, amazing coincidence, some peripheral girl-on-girl, the roots of modern philosophy, diligent research, a left-field computer pioneer and of course the Buddha. Sherlock Holmes would be featuring except that he's dead. But then so is le bon David Hume. Is Cumberbach available for the film?

Alison Gopnik was born on 16th June 1955, an auspicious day with a clatter of scientists who share that birthday, including Barbara McClintock who also had to work hard to succeed in a man's world.

Other tribs on The Blob to women in science.