Club Troppo

A highlight of my calendar I have to say – since I inadvertently morphed into Mr Innovation and they started inviting me.

Did you have an absolutely fantastic science teacher? Now’s the time to get them some recognition.

NOMINATION CALL
2012 PRIME MINISTER’S PRIZES FOR SCIENCE

We are seeking nominations for Australia’s national science and science teaching awards, which are offered to Australian citizens or those who hold permanent residence status in Australia.

·        The $300,000 Prime Minster’s Prize for Science

·        The $50,000 Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year

·        The $50,000 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year

·        The $50,000 Prime Minster’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Primary Schools

·        The $50,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools

These prizes are a key element of the Inspiring Australia national initiative to recognise and reward the achievements and successes of Australians in the sciences.

Please share this information with your networks and associates – The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science relies on nominations from across many sectors of our nation, to reward and recognise the outstanding achievements of our Australian science researchers and science teachers.

Closing Date: 27 April 2012, AEST 5.00 pm

Further queries and contact - www.innovation.gov.au/scienceprizes

Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn’t really matter. I wanted Collingwood to win it’s last game this year, but it didn’t and that’s that. Doesn’t matter. Still as I gradually realised when working on the Government 2.0 work in 2009, the element of play is critically important and not just to high level ‘brainstorming’ activity, but to seizing the opportunities for innovation of all kinds from major disruptive innovation to the most minor improvised improvements in the way things are being done.  That’s why I thought things like mashups were so wonderful – they are low cost ways of breaking things up, and inviting others into play with one’s assets (or copies of them while the ‘real’ ones remain on the official website or otherwise in the system somewhere.

And with games becoming so much more prominent in young people’s use of their time, it’s not surprising that educators are arguing that games teach a new kind of literacy. Gamification is all the rage in Silicon Valley. As Wikipedia explains, gamification is

The use of game design techniques^[1] and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes (also known as “funware“)^[2], in order to encourage people to adopt them. Gamification works by making technology more engaging^[3], by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors^[4], by showing a path to mastery and autonomy, and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.^[5] The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out tax forms, or reading web sites.^[3]

Michael Neilsen’s new book on Reinventing Discovery has this to say about Foldit, a very clever gamification of the arduous task of figuring out how proteins fold  which has generated new scientific insights about the formation of proteins.

I was skeptical when I first heard of Foldit. it sounded like the dull educational computer cames I saw in school when I was growing up in the 1980s. But I downloaded the game and spent hours playing it over several days. . . . . People play the game because it’s good.  It has the compelling, addictive quality all good computer games have: a task that’s challenging but not impossible, instant feedback on how well you’re doing, and the sense that you’re always just one step away from improvement.” (p. 146.)

But you can argue that games are more important than that. (Continued)

Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can’t quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere – or I can’t see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight – so I thought I’d post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed.

Update: someone has emailed me some code which enables me to frame the video here.

As Philip Tetlock so powerfully showed, most expertise isn’t worth nix if the criterion of expertise is whether you can demonstrate superior predictions about what will happen in the future.  As he showed, most experts can’t predict any better than tolerably informed non-experts and some experts - particularly the hedgehogs who “know one big thing” – are substantially worse than your average Joe. By contrast, some expert ‘foxes’ who know many things are a tad better.

And of course prognosticating about the future is a human foible – we’re always doing it whether it’s useful or not.  It can also involve status displays.  I recall being invited to a dinner hosted by one of Australia’s noted businessmen during the GFC with 15 or so people around the table. No-one really wanted to discuss the nature of the events.  Rather we were told by our host that he’d been talking to the head of Goldman’s in the US or some other great and powerful operator and he said so and so which involved some casual prediction. But it was painfully obvious to me – and I kept quiet about it because it would have been raining on others’ parade – that no-one really knew what would happen next and these corporate guys were less likely to know than a canny economist.  But the conversation rolled on.

I’ve always thought it strange that when journos interview experts and discuss their predictions – for instance about the dollar – that they don’t also ask them for some casual variant of a confidence interval.  Mightn’t the expert on such matters be expected to have an expert view on the value of his expertise? For instance there’s a literature on the extent to which past forecasts improve on simple rules (like predicting that today’s value will be tomorrow’s value or that tomorrow’s value will revert to the long run mean). If experts don’t volunteer such insights, shouldn’t they be asked for them?  Oh but wait, the interviewer and the interviewee are all in it together – along with the listeners. The bullshitter, the bullshittee and the bullshitted.

Anyway, it’s a nice fantasy – one which might cut swathes through the industry of being and broadcasting talking heads.

In the meantime, I came upon this nice visual illustration of the ideas here.

(Continued)

Herewith my column for Today’s Fin on the Government’s proposed new R&D Tax Credit. The paper on which it is based is on the Lateral Economics Website.

The politics of compromise can work to solve problems by taking everyone’s needs into account. But sometimes we just get caught up in pacifying those reluctant to part with existing entitlements. As Parliament debates the Government’s proposed changes to the tax concession for Business Expenditure on Research and Development (BERD), it should be wary of buying off those seeking to hang onto their BERD in the hand.

As I concluded in a recent study for the Australian Business Foundation, The BERD in the hand: Supporting Business Investment in Research and Development, if forced to choose, I’d abolish the current tax concession for R&D rather than maintain it. Why? When it was introduced in the mid 1980s it provided 24.5 cents assistance for every dollar of BERD. Today, with large reductions in company tax rate and the headline rate of assistance – from 150 to 125 per cent – it’s worth just 7.5 cents in the dollar.

So it has very little effect on business decision making – that the concession is simply a windfall on over nine tenths of R&D because it would have been done anyway. So the existing scheme probably generates more administrative, compliance and revenue costs than it does R&D benefits.

The scheme is also complex with multiple sub-schemes. And though the rate of assistance is low, some businesses have claimed a large share of their total production activities as R&D related. This sounds fair enough, but the only way it’s been affordable is via the atrophy of the rate of assistance. Both Canada and the UK can afford much more generous rates of R&D assistance, but only by ruling out production activities altogether.

And as the Cutler Report highlighted in 2008, one of the main beneficiaries of our laxity on production related R&D is mining. Some mines involving novel technical challenges have claimed the majority of their expenses as R&D related! (Continued)

And what is this fetching picture doing here? Ask Google Images which popped this up when I entered the search string "the rise of science"

In discussing ‘open science’ with someone today I thought I’d be able to refer him to a speech I’d given in late 2008 on Troppo.  Alas it wasn’t there.  I think the reason it wasn’t there is that it had been worked up from an earlier speech on Adam Smith, science and economics as the latter speech was written at short notice, so I decided at the time not to post the more developed one. But since a few years have passed, those who read the earlier shorter speech here, may not mind running into a reminder, and there is also a fair bit of content that wasn’t in the original outlining the idea of the rise of open science which wasn’t in the earlier speech and some other stuff for instance on intrinsic motivation – which again is something which is inexplicably absent in most discussion of Serious Things.

Anyway, for those who are interested, here’s the speech.

Scientists, economists, and other rent seeking creatures I have known: Recollections of a dismal scientist, Speech at the Adelaide Festival Centre for the Adelaide Research and Innovation !mpact Awards, 27th November 2008

You may be wondering who I am and what the hell I’m doing here tonight. You’ll be dismayed to know that I’m wondering the same thing. More worrying still, so are the organisers of this fine event.

Let me explain. A few months ago the Chief Scientist Jim Peacock rang and told me that he’d come to think of my contributions to the Innovation Review as so witty that he thought that if I turned up and gave a speech to the CSIRO scientists in Canberra everyone could have a good laugh.

I note he didn’t say ‘witty and wise’, but then that was just as well as it halved my level of performance anxiety.

Anyway, immediately I got off the phone, the saying that came to my terrified mind was the one attributed to Abraham Lincoln. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

I nearly rang back and cancelled, but then I realised that, from what the Chief Scientist had said, all I really needed to do was fool all of the people in the room for about fifteen minutes.

A few months later Jim got a phone call from Adelaide from the Organisers of these science awards. They thought they’d lined up tonight’s speaker – Jim’s successor as Chief Scientist Penny Sackett. But there was a clash. The previous speaker was Tim Flannery.

They’d heard about a young American up and comer who gave a good speech, but Barack Obama was busy. Anyway Jim had an idea. It seems I passed the audition in Canberra, and here I am tonight – freshly minted talent on the speaking circuit.

But the organisers are raising the bar. A bigger room, more people, a longer speech and bow ties and beautiful gowns.

So here I go. Three or four minutes already gone.

Please don’t refrain from having a few more drinks as I speak. (Continued)

We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitask, and one where they can freely organize their work. Subjects who are forced to multitask perform significantly worse than those forced to work sequentially. Surprisingly, subjects who can freely organize their own schedule also perform significantly worse. Finally, our results do not support the stereotype that women are better at multitasking. Women suffer as much as men when forced to multitask and are actually less inclined to multitask when being free to choose.

By: Thomas Buser (University of Amsterdam)
Noemi Peter (University of Amsterdam)
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20110044&r=exp

Well it’s an overused word right now but have a look at this if you’ve not seen it before – it’s lovely.

When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12. That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they’re buying potassium iodide pills.

According to a history by Susan Stacey: "Editorial comment in Idaho and other newspapers categorized the SL-1 accident as a regrettable mishap, an inevitable occurrence if society were to accrue the benefits of a new technology." Today experts argue about whether the thick concrete containment around Fukushima Daiichi’s reactor vessel is safe enough and residents of inland American states worry about nuclear radiation from the accident. But the low-powered SL-1 boiling water reactor in Idaho had no containment. It was designed to be light weight — a prototype for reactors that could be shipped to the Arctic Circle to power remote military radar stations (pdf).

During the 1950s the US military looked to nuclear power as a practical way to solve problems. One problem was how to extend the range of its bombers. It sounds outrageous today, but the air force had plans to power aircraft using nuclear reactors. As a General Electric engineer, told Congress, a nuclear powered aircraft would be "limited in range only by sandwiches and coffee for the crew".

General Electric was one of a number of contractors engaged on the military’s aircraft nuclear propulsion program. At the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) in Idaho, GE’s engineers tested a nuclear power plant that sucked air directly into the reactor with the exhaust streaming out of a pair of specially modified jet engines. To test this ‘direct cycle’ engine, GE needed an outdoor test pad. According to Stacey:

Contaminated air could not be allowed to blow out the nozzle indoors—or near work areas. Rather, the reactor-cum-engine traveled back and forth between an assembly area and the test pad, a distance of a mile and a half. A man driving a shielded locomotive hauled a dolly carrying the eighty-ton assembly on four-rail tracks. At the test pad, the engine connected to a "coupling station"where the exhaust was filtered, went up a 150-foot stack, and was released to the open air (pdf).

(Continued)

The latest situation with damaged Japanese nuclear power plants seems if anything more potentially dire and apocalyptic than what prompted my comment on Don Arthur’s post:

Seems to me that whatever now happens the nuclear power option is almost certainly a dead duck in all western nations with free media. Whatever may be the wholly utilitarian risk/benefit analysis, the images and sense of Armageddon we’re seeing coming out of Japan will be imprinted on people’s minds permanently, meaning that politicians from now on simply won’t be able to propose nuclear power solutions without facing terminal electoral consequences.

The images coming out of Japan mean that it’s game, set and match to the Greens on the nuke power issue and we need to get on and develop other sustainable, low carbon baseload power options.

However, it appears that currently feasible non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel baseload power options (i.e. commercially deployable in the near future) are by no means obvious.

Nuclear pebble bed reactors seemed to hold some hope of cheaper nuclear options that didn’t carry the risk of overheating and meltdown so evident in Japan. However, trial reactor programs have largely been abandoned as unpromising.

Hydrogen fuel is fraught with problems that haven’t been solved, mostly related to its volatility, lightness and very low energy/volume ratio.  Compressing or liquefying it are both extraordinarily expensive.

Solar thermal might be capable of development to something approaching baseload constant availability with storage of energy generated during the day (e.g. superheated water) but certainly isn’t ready to be deployed on a large scale.  Moreover cost appears almost prohibitive:

Due to the nature of technology and the electricity market, says BZE, the carbon price would need to be above $70 a tonne before it could begin to have benefits for any new form of renewable energy generation. Between $70 and $200 a tonne, the signal is for extra growth in wind power combined with (what Wright calls) ”fossil gas”. More than $200 a tonne is needed to make baseload solar thermal viable at current prices.

“Clean coal” is almost certainly an expensive fantasy at least in most parts of the world, because very large underground storage caverns for the Co2 extracted to make “clean” coal just don’t exist.

So what else is there?  I’d be most interested in readers’  thoughts.

I note that the Green lobby is arguing that you really don’t need any baseload power sources at all, and that enough continuous electricity can be delivered by a patchwork of renewable but non-continuous sources, perhaps supplemented occasionally by reserve LNG plants.  Mark Diesendorff is a leading local proponent of that approach, and a retired scientist Dr David Mills claims that the US could meet all its current electricity needs with such a patchwork approach and without relying on either nuclear or fossil fuels.  Somehow I have my doubts, but again I’d be interested in readers’ thoughts (especially those with some relevant knowledge/expertise).