Tag Archives: Science

Controversies II

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It’s been a few days since I posted. Mostly because my friend Brian just moved to Eindhoven and I’ve been busy showing him around. But i also had an exam on friday and was kept busy with that.

In my last post, a reader pointed out that I was perhaps being a bit over generalizing with the group of people that refute climate change. I said that it was rural christian republicans that most likely refused to accept the evidence for climate change. I still say this is true, however, not everyone that falls into this description refuses to accept climate change.

Indeed, we should be thankful for that. In a study that was looking to determine how trust is developed in an informational source it was determined that similarity in other opinions increases trust in topics unrelated. Meijnders et al (2009) investigated the trust that develops with sources related to Genetically Modified foods.  They found that when there is no other information about the source other than what they wrote about an unrelated topic if the opinions matched it increased trust in the source. So if an author wrote about a cash register and the reader agreed with the author, and then the reader read an article about GM foods by the same author there would be higher acceptance of the information in the source. It also found the opposite to be true as well. That if there was a difference in opinion then it would lead to a rejection of the author and they would dispute their claims.

What does this have to do with climate change or any other controversy though? Well, who are the people that speak the most about evolution and climate change? Scientists, and as Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out in his talk on naming rights that 40% of scientists in the US don’t believe in God and 85% from the National Academy of Science. For the group that has the biggest issues with these topics this reduces any  trust between the reader and the author. The amount of evidence presented become inconsequential as there’s no trust between the two and the evidence may in fact strengthen the rejection of climate change or evolution.

How can we deal with this? Well, one way is through more communication with the general public. It may also include educating the religious leaders of how the science works and why they should accept the evidence. Many atheists may not like that idea, but these leaders can reach a lot of people and they are a trusted source of information on other topics. The next step would be to have christian scientists that work within the field of evolution (there are some not many) and climate change explain how these two accepted scientific principles do not conflict with belief in god.

The catholic church has already accepted evolution, and have made positive remarks on climate change. This helps some, but most US citizens are not catholic, so we need to go after different people. Evolution is going to be much more difficult to succeed in this. As pastors are leading the charge against evolution in many churches. However, there is no reason why an approach like this would not work for climate change.

In controversial topics, science would be better served to be inclusive in educating as many religious leaders as possible to ensure that their followers are getting correct information from the best sources. This is in additional more scientific communication in general. More scientists need to function as journalists and start their own blogs.

References:
Meijnders et al, 2009, “The role of similarity cues in the development of trust in sources of information about GM foods”, Risk Analysis vol 29, no 8 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2009.01240.x/full
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

Science Controversies in the US

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In the US, there are a few “controversies” raging in the public debate. For the most part these controversies have been settle in the scientific community and many other countries. Europe for exam does not have a problem with either evolution through natural selection and climate change. These two are huge problems in the US. What are some others? Geocentric solar system, flat earth, connection between HIV and AIDs, and the link between autism and vaccines. While most of these can be laughed off, such as the geocentric or flat earth, others can have serious repercussions. For instance there is a growing population that is refusing to vaccinate their children because they are afraid that they will develop autism. This not only puts that child at risk, but it also puts every other child around them at risk.vaccines only work when a critical mass is vaccinated, because not all vaccines actually take. Typically, scientists look at people that are skeptical of the main stream science with scorn and tend to mock them. This will not get people to change their views.

I’m going to focus on evolution and climate change in this blog. Mostly because the people that don’t accept the evidence for either or both fit into the same set of people. Dealing, I don’t know enough about the autism/vaccine group to comment on them intelligently.

Who are the people that reject evolution most often? They are typically rural white, Christians that are also republicans (article). The same people also reject climate change (I can’t find an article, but republicans rejected global warming in the house). So, let’s assume that these people aren’t stupid, uneducated and are not immoral. What reasons could they have to reject Climate change?

Well, what kind of ethics are these people following? They believe that humans have no ability to change nature. This is actually a belief that Kant held, that there is a separation between what humans can impact and what they cannot impact. Next the Bible says God won’t allow another flood. This, to some extent, falls under the belief that we don’t have the ability to impact the world enough to destroy it.

BUT! Look at the data! It’s pretty obvious. Unfortunately, we humans have an amazing ability to take contradictory evidence and convince ourselves that it’s actually completely wrong and strengths our currently held position. So, people will create elaborate stories or point to anecdotal evidence that “disproves” the aggregate data. Meijnders et al, puts this as statistics are humans with the tears dried off. Basically we need stories. We don’t understand statistics  or how it relates to people in general.

Are these people being irrational? Well, the first case is clearly not irrational. They are operating within a clear set of ethical principles that dictated to them that the world is not at risk as we cannot impact it in this way whatsoever. Not accepting scientific evidence to the contrary is not irrational. The second part, well that’s a defense mechanism to increase the rationality of their decision. If you can show that these data are wrong, then obviously your ethical stance is even more justified.

Accepting climate change as fact for many of these people would cause an earth shattering change in their current belief system. It won’t cause them to lose faith in the bible or anything, however it will force them to look at their current behavior in a way that maybe incredibly painful for them.

Tomorrow, I’ll attempt to come up with some ways to correct this problem. How we address this is important for addressing our growing climate problem.

References:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
Meijnders et al (2009) “The Role of Similarity Cues in the Development of Trustin Sources of Information About GM Food” Risk Analysis Vol 29, No. 8 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2009.01240.x/full

Patents and Innovations

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So, I think that the news that Apple and Nokia decided to drop lawsuits against each other is a good starting point for this discussion. Here’s the BBC article discussing the decision. Basically, Apple decided to license several patents from Nokia. Which in itself has some implication for innovation within the Smart Phone market.

I plan to do several of these types of posts. However, in this one I will focus specifically on smart phones. This will extend to many other product spaces, but not to software or business models.

So first what are some implications of this agreement by Nokia and Apple? Well, the most obvious is that they aren’t suing each other any more. The less obvious is that neither of these cases was heard by a judge or a jury. This doesn’t allow us, the observer, to actually know if these patents were valid or not (see my post on patents to see what a valid patent is). In some cases the patent office, whichever office, may approve a patent that is invalid. This could be due to prior art, like the PB&J sandwich described in my patent post, or that it’s an obvious invention. The only way that a patent’s validity can be overturned is by a jury or a judge. Let’s say that Nokia is also suing HTC over the exact same infringement. HTC doesn’t believe that the Nokia patent is valid so they were also counter suing saying that it’s an invalid patent and HTC has the reasons why. So, this case goes to trial and Nokia is now able to say that Apple is currently licensing this patent from them. This claim will give a great deal of credibility to Nokia’s claim. At this point HTC may have to decide to license with Nokia to avoid the potential of a huge fine.

In this case Nokia has a tract record of being an innovative firm. What happens when the firm isn’t an innovative firm or has no products though? Well, these cases happen all the time. For instance a few years ago RIM, the maker of BlackBerry was hit with a lawsuit that would have effectively shut down the Blackberry network, or prevent emails. Here’s a link to when it started. While at the time it was a $60million fine, it eventually got up to $612.5 million. The firm suing BlackBerry NTP, doesn’t actually produce anything. They are a patent management firm. In other words, a patent troll.

So what does this do to our economy when it’s based upon innovation. Patenting is supposed to protect innovative firms from competition so they can exploit their invention. It’s supposed to grow the economy, as these firms can license out the patent and allow other people to manufacture the product. Well, in this case it took $612.5 million from the pocket of a firm that was innovating and creating a product and put it into the pocket of a firm that doesn’t produce anything. That’s not the best for innovation.

There are some good things about the patents though. For instance, once the Xerox patent expired for the copier, there was an explosion of innovation in the field and Xerox nearly lost all market share. It had to sprint to catch back up. How did this happen? Well, you are allowed to work on a patented technology for research and development. Xerox’s competitors didn’t sit idle while Xerox was dominating the market. They were waiting until they were able to sell a product and then unleashed pent up innovation onto the market. This was an excellent thing for consumers. We can thank the fact that this patent ran out for our 3 in 1 printers.

Innovation

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Yesterday I said I was going to discuss how patents impacted innovation. However, I think the first thing we need to do is clarify what innovation is. Schumpeter, described innovation as bringing a product to the market. He claims that without innovation, invention is worthless. Indeed, patents play this out. There is no legal requirement to actually manufacture anything that you’ve patented. I will discuss that in more detail tomorrow though. Schumpeter also notes that these innovations are the source of creative destruction in the economy. He claims that through innovation we are able to keep growing. He called these the long waves. See the picture below for a representation of these waves and the innovations that drove the economy at the time.

Based on Schumpeterian principles we can see that we should expect growth slow down and potentially economic issues at these times. So, if an innovation is bringing a product to a market, in what ways can we innovate? There are four ways in which innovation can occur in a product; Incremental, Modular, Architectural and Radical. Please see the picture below:

Henderson and Clark ,1990

Most innovation occurs in the upper left hand corner, incremental innovations. These are fairly obvious and most people aren’t surprised to see these products. Products like iPhone 3G after the iPhone first came out. this was an incremental innovation on this product. While Apple did a fantastic job making it sound like it was a radical innovation, it simply wasn’t.

The next most likely is the modular. In this case it could be considered that an electric car might be a modular change. As you only have to change one part of a larger piece of equipment. In this case a combustion engine is replaced with an electric engine.

The architectural changes are less common than either of the previous. As these ones typically require a great deal of changes within a firm. An architectural change can be described as going from a ceiling fan into a box fan (Henderson and Clark 1990). Seems pretty simple right? Well, there are a lot of changes that go into this innovation. You have to think about how to keep the box from falling over. How to keep the noise down. How to protect the users. You also have to manufacture everything differently. So, in many cases there are two innovations within an architectural innovation. One at the product level and one at the firm level. Another example is the reintegration of the original developers of the Mac into Apple after the successful product launch.

The final type of innovation is the radical innovation. This is the stuff that “creative destruction” is made from. When these types of innovations occur most of the previous knowledge base is blown away and the innovators have to start all over again. I’d say the most common example of something like this would be with game consoles. Basically each time a new one comes out everything starts all over again. Other examples can include things like the Jet engine from the propeller. Not only did this require changes in the aircraft but it also required changes in the runway, it needed to be longer than before.

There are many cases of Radical innovations and in some cases they completely reworked our economy. IT/ICT is the most recent set of radical innovations that is shaping our economy. These technologies are heavily patented and impact our economy. Tomorrow I will look at how these patents interact with innovation to increase or decrease the rate of innovation.

Further reading/Citation:
Henderson, R., Clark, Kim. “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1.
http://dimetic.dime-eu.org/dimetic_files/HendersonClarkASQ1990.pdf

But it’s JUST a theory.

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The point of this post is not to defend evolution, but to investigate the different meanings behind the word theory. However, this point comes up most frequently when people discussion evolution and possibly climate change. The word theory has become a very loaded word during discussions between scientists and non-scientists. It causes scientists to come across as arrogant to non-scientists. What causes people to believe that these scientists are arrogant? Well in Professor Dawkin’s documentary “Root of all Evil” Ted Haggard claims it has to do with how certain scientists are about their “theories.” Where scientists look down upon non-scientists in their ignorant views. For science this is a dangerous proposition where the people scientists need to convince the most that many different forms of scientific research needs to be conducted and funded publicly, scientists come across as arrogant know it alls that refuse to explain anything to the common person. This has also been noted in a Pew Science Survey.

So, why are scientists “arrogant” about their “theories?” Well, first it’s not arrogance. It’s extreme confidence in the current understanding of the world. The “theories” describe the state of the world and how we interact with it. However, there is a misunderstanding about the word theory. This can come from two ways. First, intentional intellectual dishonesty. In this case there is not much to be done, other than attempt to bring out this fraud and discredit the person on this basis. The second is an honest misunderstanding of the word. This may be difficult for many scientists to actually believe, but I think this can legitimately happen. While people who are actively interested in science are constantly being refreshed and reminded of how science works why it works and all the great things it has done for us, people who aren’t interest forget these things. Many of them haven’t had a refresher on how science works since high school, and that’s if they were paying attention to their teacher. They believe that a theory is a general idea of how something works, a educated guess.

I plan to elaborate on the differences in definitions through using a model presented through psychology in 1986. The study claims there are folk theories on how technology works, specifically thermostats. It is clear that there is the correct “scientific” theory of how the thermostat works, so it will be easy to compare the differences in the two different thermostat theories.

Willet Kempton’s article “Two theories of home heat control” is a survey of residents of Detroit Michigan of how the thermostat works in their house. The survey shows two prevailing theories. The valve theory and the feedback theory. The feedback theory is fairly straight forward, the thermostat detects the temperature and either turns on or off the furnace based on the deviation from the set temperature. The valve theory is a little different, this theory claims that when you turn up the thermostat you are increasing the flow of hot air the furnace is producing, which will increase the rate the house warms up. There maybe some reasons why this theory was popular, the fact that the thermostat was a knob and that many people were used to using radiators to heat their house previously. These two theories were defined as “Folk Theories” which fall into the general category of educated guess or a hunch of how it works.

However, we know that both of these cannot be correct. So at this point we have competing paradigms or research programs. So to determine which one is correct we conduct experiments. We collect temperature data of the air coming from the ventilator at various different thermostat settings. This allows us to test our hypothesis that the thermostat is actually a valve. Since the feedback theory is basically correct our data would show that the temperature of the air is constant or near constant regardless of the temperature setting on the thermostat.

Now we can move onto test the theory of the feedback mechanism. We can create more sophisticated tests to determine what the on/off points are for the furnace and create a model of how the thermostat interacts with the furnace to maintain the heat in a house. Over time we can build confidence in our model and other people can test our model in their own home and check the validity.

When people accept this model based on empirical evidence we then can say we have a scientific theory. However, this theory, while it may have been formed from a folk theory, has been thoroughly tested and replicated by many individuals. We can find many different examples of this in science, from biology, theories of gravity, relativity, the origin of the world, the list goes on and on.

Folk theories are hunches and educated guesses. Scientific theories are verifiable, testable and may be contradictory to our personal intuition.