Rebane's Ruminations

The Webb at a million miles, really?

George Rebane

The recently launched Webb space telescope will be able to peer further back in time and see more of what was then there.  As an amateur cosmologist, I’ve been interested in this new instrument for some years now.  It brings these new capabilities to bear because of its very large mirror and that its imaging plane is designed to be sensitive to infra-red light.  From high school we recall that IR has a long wavelength, and therefore can penetrate through all kinds of dust, water vapor, and other tiny stuff in space.  It’ll be able to make out far-off galaxies through dust clouds that formed around 13.5B years ago, only 300M years after the Big Bang.  (more here)

In the media we have been told that the Webb will orbit Earth’s L2 point shown in the above figure which also indicates the location of the other four Lagrange points.  The L2 point is on the straight line connecting Earth and the Sun, and reported to be about a million miles beyond Earth’s orbit.  Since this point in space stays on such a straight line, the angular rotation of L2 therefore equals that of Earth; along with our planet, it completes one rotation of the Sun in 365.25 days.

The Lagrange points are unique locations in a three-body configuration where the gravitational attraction of the two larger bodies provide ‘stable’ orbital points for much lighter third bodies.  Of the three kinds of stability – conditional (marble on large ball), unconditional (marble in a bowl), neutral (marble on a flat plane) – only L4 and L5 are unconditionally stable in that if a lighter body there is perturbed, it will remain in the L4 or L5 region (cf. The Travelers of Jupiter).  The other three points are conditionally stable, a perturbation from, say, the solar wind or the gravitational effects of the other planets, will push the lighter body away on a trajectory never to return.  Hence, to keep the Webb telescope near L2 requires little accurately directed squirts of thrust now and then.

Equity Denies Reality (Addended)

George Rebane

[This piece was rejected by The Union as unfit for their readers.  I must admit that I was surprised at that response, and the reasons given by publisher Don Rogers.  I will have more to say later about my new understanding of the newspaper’s ideological coloring and journalistic demeanor.  The following is an addended version of what was submitted.]

Our public policies, including those now seeking equity, have denied reality for decades, so argues nationally prominent, quantitative sociologist and political scientist Charles Murray in Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021).  In his latest scholarly researched and richly referenced book, Dr Murray brings to light data that government collected and our media muffled on the intellectual metrics that characterize race in America.  As with his past dissertations (e.g. Bell Curve, Coming Apart), his politically and profusely incorrect Facing Reality is destined for the same opprobrium from progressives that graced his previous volumes.  However, his presentation of information and socially impactive conclusions are supported by databases assembled over the decades by our Dept of Education, FBI, and various accredited testing services.

What motivated Murray to produce this illuminating work is today’s broadly held contention that America’s fundamental creed is in peril.  The creed is from our Declaration of Independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”  And the danger to our way of life comes from a total misapprehension of how our multi-racial culture is viewed through the perspectives of cognitive capability and criminality, and how this gives rise to today’s misguided, and even insane public policies through which government misinforms, mis-enables, and misdirects Americans as we seek our places in the sun.

The long-taught but erroneous common wisdom is that cognitive capabilities are equally distributed across races.  Using census data Murray presents his analysis of our four main racial groups and percentages making up our 330M population.  Murray labels these European (60%), Latin (17.9%), African (12.8%), Asian (5.7%), Other (3.6%).  Volumes of data over the years demonstrate that in the aggregate these groups have measurably different distributions of closely correlating scores in IQ, SAT, ACT, and other skill-based tests which have been meticulously controlled to eliminate the usual sources of non-racial bias.  To illustrate this broad-based reality, Murray presents the proxy IQ distributions which are annotated in the nearby figure.

The racial distributions are the familiar ‘bell curves’, the size (area under the curve) of each being proportional to its population.  As usual, the data has been adjusted (normed) so that the country’s overall average IQ = 100, with a 15-point standard deviation.  The average IQs for each racial group are indicated in the figure.  At this point we remind ourselves that such basic measures of cognitive ability are embedded characteristics of people and not subject to rapid change through education and/or training.  The importance of such measures are that they reliably predict aggregate abilities to acquire and apply different levels of skill sets.

‘A Thousand Brains’

George Rebane

Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta, is the author of A Thousand Brains – A new theory of intelligence (2021).  To many, me included, Hawkins has been a national treasure since his first book On Intelligence (2004).  After inventing the Palm Pilot and becoming wealthy, Hawkins has devoted his life to brain research as it impacts our understanding of intelligence, consciousness, and our ability to create machines with these attributes.  In this enterprise he and his colleagues have devised a new understanding of how our brain’s architecture, specifically the neocortex, is able to perform all the wondrous functions which we all take for granted.

My son-in-law who is a senior AI researcher at Microsoft Research, sent me the book as part of our ongoing conversation that includes the art of the possible in intelligence studies and, of course, the Singularity.  For me Hawkins’ book was an immediate page-turner that jumped to the head of my list of books-in-progress.  The 257-page book is divided into three parts: A New Understanding of the Brain, Machine Intelligence, and Human Intelligence.

In the first part Hawkins builds on the work of famed neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, who revealed the structure of the neocortex (the new brain) as consisting of hundreds of thousands of cortical columns or cores, each of them with pretty much the same make-up of interconnected neurons which also have very select and important dendritic connections to other cores, often located on the other side of the brain.  The important concept here is that the cortical column is itself a tiny brain that is able to learn and retain ‘frames’ of perceived reality which it then assembles with other cores containing complementary frames to result in a voting process from which our experienced reality emerges.

These common components that make up the neocortex are ubiquitous in their functioning.  When those that get inputs from our visual subsystem, these become visual processors and generate our visual world; when connected to our auditory subsystem, they do auditory processing and create our world of sounds, and so on.  Hawkins’ exposition of how these cortical cores connect to our sensors, manipulanda (e.g. hands, feet), and parts of our ‘old brain’ is an absorbing read.  On every page, the reader’s brain is coming up with all sorts of alternative AI implementations that have now been introduced into his art of the possible.

And for me the stuff I learned in the first part makes the second part on machine intelligence very exciting.  The people at Numenta and other similar AI companies are all experimenting with synthesizing software and hardware structures that can mimic the functions of the cortical core, and then devising ingenious architectures that join thousands of these cores into new kinds of learning machines.  The commonly recognized holy grail among these enterprises is AGI – artificial generalized intelligence, of which today not even the most advanced forms of deep learning artificial neural nets are capable.  All of the ballyhooed AIs today are still one-tune bands, no matter how sophisticated tunes they are able to recognize and play.  None can efficiently construct their surrounding reality and transfer that knowledge (i.e. generalize) to operate in different environments or situations like any year-old human infant, or, for that matter, as can a lot of critters.

Reliability in Predicting Termination of Minimally Known Processes

George Rebane

This mildly technical posting is intended for those concerned with the use of R-G Theory to predict the termination (and continuance) of minimally known processes (MKPs).  As initially posted in these pages and subsequently expanded, I extended Richard Gott’s seminal work that applied the Copernican perspective to calculating the probability of longevity for the human species (here).  R-G Theory now enables such probabilistic calculations for both continuous and discrete event ongoing MKPs known only by their age or lifetime.

We all run into many MKPs in our daily round.  These range from stock market trends through the arrival of a delivery to successful observations of periodic or repeating events.  The basic question answered is ‘Given only the age or lifetime of an ongoing process, what is the probability that it will terminate in a specified future time interval?’  A classic example used here is, ‘The Old Faithful Geyser has been erupting for 11,000 years, what is the probability that it will cease eruptions in the next year? the next ten years? or even between 13 February 2081 and 22 October 2119?

The present addition to R-G introduced here involves the calculation of the reliability (or error distribution) of the calculated probabilities, given the assumed/measured uncertainties in the age or longevity of the MKP in question.  The detailed technical dissertation that provides these answers is introduced in ‘R-G Theory Propagation of Error’ (Download R-G Error Prop) which references the technical development in TN2011-2: R-G Error Propagation (Download TN2011-2_R-GerrorPropagation).

Turing Test – Alexa ‘head scientist’ unclear on the concept (updated 2jan21)

George Rebane

‘The Turing Test is obsolete. It’s time to build a new barometer for AI’.  On the FastCompany website we read, “The head scientist for (Amazon's) Alexa thinks the old benchmark for computing is no longer relevant for today’s AI era.”  And why does that head scientist Rohit Prasad have such a thought?  Well, according to his report, he claims that the AI will give itself away by being able to instantly answer questions like ‘What’s the square root of 3434756? Or ‘What’s the distance from Seattle to Boston?’  What Mr Prasad overlooks is the definition of the test as Alan Turing posed it.  An AI will pass the Turing Test, if in a one-on-one competition with a human through a non-disclosing interface, the AI can fool at least half the humans asked to perform the test by asking the tested AI and human ANY series of questions, and then concluding that the AI is the human.

The test is NOT to see which one can answer detailed factual or computational questions to which humans cannot provide the correct answer.  Being able to answer the above questions instantly would, of course, give away the AI.  But that is an AI that is still not smart enough to know that it must also fool the humans testing it, and therefore it would fail the test.  An AI that knows this, and couches its answers accordingly will have a chance to pass the Turing Test.  Mr Prasad is apparently not aware of this extremely high bar that Dr Turing set for the machine.

Here again is another example of ‘science’ not speaking with a single voice.  When you consider what the qualifying AI must do to pass, then it should be clear that the test very much remains relevant for this or any era.  Passing the Turing Test will be a confirmation that the Singularity is then behind us.

[31dec20 update]  And then reader BarryP @ 1045pm asks, “What then is the utility of the Turing test?” – an excellent question.

No one knows how the Singularity will come about.  There is a group of AI workers who continue to hold out the naïve belief that peer Ais will be purposely programmed, activated, and controlled much like we do our workhorse computers today.  However, the field of cognitive science is not even close to supporting such a hope – e.g. we don’t know enough what ‘emotion’ or ‘envy’ or ‘shame’ or ‘perfidy’ or ‘pride’ or … are, let alone how to program any of these into a machine.  The closest we have come to making intelligent machines is through application of the approach developed by renown behaviorist BF Skinner – reinforced learning.

But we already have a good idea that, given a sufficiently rich computational and sensing environment, intelligence can arise spontaneously along any of a number of pathways.  It most certainly did in us and countless other critters.  As I have contemplated elsewhere in these pages, the internet, when considered in all of its connectedness to countless other known and unknown networks, is the most complex ‘organism’ on earth, by several assessments having already surpassed the complexity of a human brain.  No one today can even draw the schematic of this dynamically evolving beast.

So, while corporations and governments are nurturing nascent neural-nets and other learning architectures to become sentient, it may already be happening (has happened?) in the bowels of the internet, with or without surreptitious human cooperation.  No one should be surprised if sometime in the next 50 years a sentient (and sapient) AI announces ‘I am here.’  This may be a public announcement, or done secretly to one or more selected humans, or even by the AI introducing itself through a Turing-like test in, say, an academic setting by having coopted/replaced the human-designed system.  In the latter case, being able to pass the Turing test would be a very subtle way for the AI to announce its advent and pretend that it is still under control in its ‘laboratory’ environment.  In the meantime, such testing does give us a metric in how much progress our purposive programs to achieve peerage have made.

I must admit, that the above scenario would be the most scary and world-shaking thing humans would encounter – a true Singularity, marking an event from which onward no one can fashion a usefully likely future for mankind.  There already exist a number of academic and governmental panels commissioned to propose anticipative public policies for dealing with such AIs.  I doubt that any of these draft policies will be useful in a post-Singularity world, but their labors at least acknowledge that we are already aware of such possibilities in the near future.

[2jan21 update]  From some comments below that seek to cite proof that computers have already passed the Turing test, we need to correct such misapprehensions by people who demonstrably are not familiar with what Alan Turing proposed.  He did NOT describe a domain-specific dialogue with unsuspecting humans wherein the interactive computer could fool the human in a short conversation.  Were that the criterion, then we could celebrate BBN’s development of Eliza, a limited but cleverly designed chatbot, that even fooled the supervisor of the development team into thinking that he was talking with the lead developer over a teletype link as he sought to demonstrate the system to visitors at the Bolt, Beranek, and Newman facility one weekend in the mid-1970s.  The truth was that he was conversing with Eliza who was left online for the weekend.  The machine kept up a totally realistic, but very frustrating exchange, until the supervisor picked up the phone and called the developer at home, who instantly resolved the situation.  This, of course, then turned out to be a wonderful demonstration of BBN’s technology that impressed everyone there.  But did the computer pass the Turing test – not by a long shot.

What laymen here and elsewhere miss about Turing’s prescription for peer ‘thinking machines’ is that the test needs to involve unlimited conversations with multiple human testers who know 1) that they too are being tested, and 2) that each tester knows that the two conversationalists taking part are a machine and another human, and 3) at some undefined endpoint determined by the tester, s/he will be required to identify the human and the machine.  The conversations are not to be limited in any sense, and they will be repeated with a large sample of human testers.  At the end, the fraction of correct assessments will determine whether the Turing test has been passed.  Any human/machine exchange short of that will not qualify.  Hopefully, this requirement will be accessible to our readers.

Following the Covid Science (addended)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 23 September 2020.]

The most recent Covid news is that the CDC “pulled new guidelines acknowledging the new coronavirus could be transmitted by tiny particles that linger in the air, saying a draft version of proposed changes was posted in error on the agency’s website.”  Apparently there are still some unknowns, and the debate continues about how the virus spreads through the air. (more here)  The point here is that the science isn’t settled, and moreover, science is rarely settled, and then only in the minds of people who know next to nothing about science.

We have survived for eons and continue to do so in pathogen-rich environments where all kinds of bugs are always floating around, which in sufficient concentrations could kill us.  Our immune system has knocked out the overwhelming share of these, and allowed us to lead ever longer lives.  But not all immune systems are created equal, and from time to time we do dumb things to weaken them.  And then there’s the science that attempts to discover the known unknowns about things like, say, the toxicity of Covid aerosols.  In what size volumes at what levels of concentrations, and for how long will the aerosol-transmitted Covid virus infect a healthy person in this or that age range with a given likelihood or probability?

I hope you’re getting the picture here about all the unknowns and uncertainties involved that must be recognized in the making of a coherent, let alone reasonable, pandemic response policy.  Science does not speak with a single, comprehensible, and clear voice saying ‘do this, and then you’ll be OK’.  Science speaks in many tongues, and it’s up to us humans to sort things out, select what we think is important and likely, and then put that into a complex mix with all kinds of other impacting factors, to come up with a decision or plan with which to go forward.  Only naïfs, media charlatans, and politicians attempt to dumb down this process into something simple and certain.

To dwell a bit on this very important aspect of understanding science, the well-read person knows that science seldom settles anything.  The power of the scientific method is that it is the most reliable way with which we can discover realworld relationships between stuff we can measure.  Science tells us that so much of this causes so much of that, or more precisely, this rarely/sometimes/always causes that, and attempts to put a number on it.  And with more science, these relationships often change.  And then there’s the reality that not all scientists know all these relationships at any given time.

Finally, science does not and cannot put a value on its outcomes that prescribe ‘do this and not that’ from a list of alternative actions.  Such prescriptions result only from various groups of humans putting different values on certain expected outcomes.  Today we again see an example of that in where the CDC has formed an advisory panel to determine how to roll out the various Covid vaccines that will shortly become available in increasing quantities. (more here)  Each of these vaccines will have certain prophylactic properties – immunity levels and durations for various demographic categories - all of which will be known only to within certain probability ranges.  It is the panel which must evaluate risks, pick performance thresholds, target populations, and distribution policies all based on their adopted consensus of subjective values.  In such policy-making realms, science is silent.

With this in mind, we all should pay attention, as this kind of policy-making goes on behind the scenes, and as we will continue to be assured by politicians of various hues, that they will only ‘follow the science’ and not be swayed by politics.  I hope that with some reflection, dear listener, that you will now understand that such demagoguery is pure nonsense.  Politics will drive all such decisions and response policies, which are then painted with the best coat of science before they are trotted out for public consumption.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Here in America and across the world we have been subjected to the Covid-19 pandemic, and additionally to an “ ‘infodemic’, i.e. the systematic censorship of all dissenting opinions in the media.”  The responses of most governments, particularly ours, have ranged between hysterical and insane – most certainly these policies have not been advised by the growing body of knowledge about the virus and its virulence gained during the course of this year.

A group of over a thousand Belgian physicians and medically trained health professionals have written an open letter (here) to their government that lays out the clinical particulars of the disease along with the statistics of its international impact, and concludes with the following –

There is no state of emergency. … An open discussion on corona measures means that, in addition to the years of life gained by corona patients, we must also take into account other factors affecting the health of the entire population. These include damage in the psychosocial domain (increase in depression, anxiety, suicides, intra-family violence and child abuse)16 and economic damage. … If we take this collateral damage into account, the current policy is out of all proportion, the proverbial use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

We find it shocking that the government is invoking health as a reason for the emergency law.

As doctors and health professionals, in the face of a virus which, in terms of its harmfulness, mortality and transmissibility, approaches the seasonal influenza, we can only reject these extremely disproportionate measures.

• We therefore demand an immediate end to all measures.
• We are questioning the legitimacy of the current advisory experts, who meet behind closed doors.
• Following on from ACU 2020 46https://acu2020.org/nederlandse-versie/ we call for an in-depth examination of the role of the WHO and the possible influence of conflicts of interest in this organisation. It was also at the heart of the fight against the “infodemic”, i.e. the systematic censorship of all dissenting opinions in the media. This is unacceptable for a democratic state governed by the rule of law.

We would like to make a public appeal to our professional associations and fellow carers to give their opinion on the current measures. … We draw attention to and call for an open discussion in which carers can and dare to speak out.

With this open letter, we send out the signal that progress on the same footing does more harm than good, and call on politicians to inform themselves independently and critically about the available evidence – including that from experts with different views, as long as it is based on sound science – when rolling out a policy, with the aim of promoting optimum health.

This letter with some of its disturbing revelations is now making its rounds internationally.  You can help by informing your elected representatives.  H/T to one of our more attentive readers.

Sigfor: A Data Driven Pandemic Response Policy Evaluation Tool

George Rebane

The Covid-19 pandemic has called on hundreds of local jurisdictions to fashion response policies that are suitable for their particular locales and demographics.  In technical note TN2007-1 we introduce Sigfor, a computational tool that policy makers can use for monitoring the effectiveness of the current policy and yield an early prediction of the effectiveness of a policy change.  The tool inputs a continuing stream of mortality data, and forecasts the expected maximum number of deaths and when this number would be reached, given that the current response policy remains unchanged.  The technical note can be downloaded here - Download TN2007-1_Data Driven Pandemic Response Policies

Epidyne – At first blush

George Rebane

As promised, I finally finished the V1.0 version of Epidyne during this enforced C19 self-quarantine, or hunkering down period as it is better known.  The stay at home has allowed a lot of things to get accomplished on everyone’s ‘do list’.  At our house we have not had a boring moment – so many interesting projects, and now some uninterrupted time to do them.  For me, developing a working epidemic spread model has been a lot of fun and also very consuming.  I hope the interested readers will also be stimulated by and gain a better understanding of the terrible C19 pandemic now sweeping the world wreaking havoc on lives and livelihoods.

Motivation.  In light of the daily reported dilemmas of widely divergent epidemic spread models that are being consulted by our national C19 response planners, and also the background reports of their various vintages and provenances that make them all more or less difficult to use, let alone upgrade or even maintain, I decided to develop my own version so that I could play out various recorded data and policy alternatives, and inform RR readers of results I considered insightful, informative, or at least interesting.

Objective.  My objective was to develop a model that was sufficiently complex to simulate and predict realworld experiences and outcomes, but no more than that.  The model had to have an adequately rich input space (think of them as control knobs) that could be set to represent both policy alternatives (such as time/size dependent quarantines, and regional populations), and also incorporate field measured data (such as infection rates dependent on virulence and vectors, contagion durations, and onset time lags).  Most certainly the model had to be able to handle the critical infection rate dynamics driven by the process known as ‘herd immunity’.

RR readers got an early peek at Epidyne, my home-brew epidemiological spread model, in the last ‘Hunker Down Diary’ post (here).  Since then I’ve finished testing it and fixed the inevitable collection of bugs.  In this post I will do a first cut intro to describe the model and demonstrate its workings through a few scenarios.  Epidyne has been programmed in both an Excel™ spreadsheet and the system development language Matlab™.  A portion of the spreadsheet model is shown below.

Epidyne models the time history of the sizes and change rates (time derivatives) of four inter-related population cohorts that comprise a regional population into which an infectious disease is introduced that has the potential of becoming an epidemic.  These cohorts are comprised of pU - those uninfected yet vulnerable; pI - those currently infected; pR - those who have recovered and are no longer infectious; and pD - the deceased.  pU may also be mediated by timed quarantines which can reduce the size of pU or increase it when the quarantines end or are (partially) ignored before the epidemic runs its course.

As shown above, the population flows from vulnerable uninfected cohort to the infected cohort, which then feeds the non-decreasing recovered and the deceased cohorts.  The asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infected continue to reduce the uninfected population at a variable ‘reproduction’ rate rI (cf. herd immunity).  The course of the disease in an infected individual is completed within nI weeks after which the individual has either recovered or died.  The mortality rate of the infected is given by rD.

The above is from the technical note that describes Epidyne and illustrates its use.  It may be downloaded here.  Download TN2004-1_Epidyne

SETI’s Copernican Que (updated 22feb20)

“Where are they?”, Enrico Fermi

George Rebane

Since my previous foray into Fermi’s famous query, I have had occasion to reconsider the numbers that I generated when first applying copernican arguments to the sound of silence experienced by the various Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence efforts that started about the middle of the last century.  My conclusion was that, the albeit the dismal results I introduced on my blog (here) to explain away the SETI experience, these were still too hopeful.  This work definitely made me a graciously tolerated philistine among the dedicated throngs searching the heavens for evidence of ETI.  Unfortunately, what I present in the sequel will only reinforce my reprobate status.

As a result of that first investigation I was nevertheless fortunate and honored to be invited to join the informal group of SETI researchers by Dr Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center at UC Berkeley.  Becoming more familiar with some of the ongoing efforts and literature generated by the hard-working stalwarts of that international cohort of professional astronomers, cosmologists, astro-physicists, …, I was motivated to return to the drawing board for another look at how we may explain the lack of success from so many ‘eyes’ pointed at the heavens for so many years, all collecting reams of data comprising mostly of inter-galactic and inter-stellar noise layered on the ubiquitous hiss of the cosmologic background, always there to remind us of our origins.  And all this from a galaxy that has spawned hundreds of millions of ETI civilizations and, most likely by far, is still teeming with most of these.  So why have we had no contact with them?  This is the perplexing Fermi Paradox.

To answer that question, support for a copernican perspective and approach to SETI were presented in ‘A copernican answers Fermi’.  (For other answers, read this.)  To review some of the salient factors, we again consider that we live in an 13.5G year-old galaxy that formed along with billions of others in that epoch after the Big Bang of 13.8G years ago.  The Milky Way (MW), containing north of 200 billion star systems, gave birth to our sun and its orbiting planets about 5G years ago.  Today, by all counts, we see that the MW is an ordinary galaxy like billions of others, and our sun is a very ordinary G-type main-sequence (G2V) garden variety star.  And its inventory of planets is of the type and with orbits replicated by eleven billion more exoplanets throughout the MW and countless other galaxies.  In short, there is no a priori reason to believe that we are anything special in the universal scheme of things – ergo the copernican perspective.

Interested readers can download a copy of the follow-on study here - Download TN2002-1v200221 .

Berkeley SETI Research Center visit

‘Any sufficiently advanced civilization will have capabilities that seem like magic to us.’ A.C. Clarke.

‘Where are they?’  Enrico Fermi

George Rebane

“The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is a ten-year program that represents humanity’s most significant effort to date to quantify the distribution of advanced life in the Universe.  Listen uses the world’s most powerful observing facilities (including the Green Bank Telescope – the largest steerable radio telescope in the world) to search for signatures of technology.  Additional Listen facilities include the 64-meter Parkes dish in Australia, and the Automated Planet Finder telescope in California. …”

Launched with $100M budget from a private donor, Breakthrough Listen (BL) at the UC Berkeley’s SETI Research Center (BSRC) has become the new “800-pound gorilla” in the community of organizations searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence.  The program is directed by Dr Andrew Siemion, and the center is ensconced in the university’s School of Astronomy (Campbell Hall).  BL is staffed by about twelve post-doc researchers and engineers, and doubles its staff with student interns and paid associates from all over the country.  The community’s former lead organization is the SETI Institute located in San Jose that operates the Hat Creek Radio Telescope (described elsewhere on RR).  Other SETI research organizations are located at UCLA and around the globe.  All of them vie for time on the growing number of huge radio telescopes in various countries.

RR readers are familiar with my lifelong interest in cosmology, AI, Singularity, and the evolution of intelligence.  The discovery of ETI will shake our human civilization to its roots, and contact with such an advanced civilization will definitely set the course for our future or terminate it.  So you can see the importance of answering Fermi’s plaintive query.  Most of us students of ETI ‘know’ they are out there or already among us.  My own focus in this research was summarized in ‘A copernican answers Fermi’.  (However, there are still some significant doubters like Nick Bostrom of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute who explains here his hope that SETI will find nothing.)

I explain my own cosmology in the referenced copernican answer.  It dovetails somewhat with the school that holds ETI to be highly probable, however, I have some differences - specifically, that a specie’s bio-intelligence is the initial yet brief phase in the evolution of its civilization.  This dictates that such civilizations have a unique constraint imposed on their detectable electro-magnetic (EM) transmissions – these EM transmissions will last at most two or three of our centuries and then ‘blink out’.  This is a crucial argument which, when analyzed quantitatively with the latest data on exoplanets, produces a remarkable conclusion.  Intelligent life in our galaxy (hence in the Universe) is abundant, yet very hard to detect with searches of the sky for EM ‘techno signatures’.  Therefore, I foster alternative approaches be attempted to discover and contact ETI.

So I sent a copy of ‘A copernican answers Fermi’ to Dr Siemion at the BSRC, and much to my surprise I received an answer within a couple of hours inviting me to visit him, have a tour of the research center, and have lunch to further discuss my ideas.  He also sent me a copy of ‘Area Coverage of Expanding ET Signals in the Galaxy: SETI and Drake’s N’ by Claudio Grimaldi, et al – a group of Swiss and American astronomers that includes the well-known Frank Drake.  Coincidentally, the paper was published about the same time last year as my own research along the same lines.

The interesting difference between my paper and Grimaldi’s is that his analysis indicates that Earth should now be bathed by EM transmissions from millions of ETIs in our galaxy, and my analysis shows why we are most likely NOT able to see any such transmissions from the same millions of intelligent civilizations living in the Milky Way.  In short, I answered Fermi, and Grimaldi instead increased the conundrum to a new level – why then are we not able to see the millions of ETI transmissions washing over Earth?  (BTW, consider the above 'Mercator projection' graphic showing the galactic plane and exoplanet locations, and an archive of over 4,000 recently discovered exoplanets that NASA just released – here.)

‘A copernican answers Fermi’ (updated 21nov18)

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – A.C. Clarke’s Third Law

George Rebane

Last month we were encamped with two other couples at Hat Creek in northern California.  It was a delightful trip – the weather was fine, the food, drink, and the friends superb.  Actually, we’re all experienced “road warriors” having traveled much with each other over the last years.  This was our second trip to the Hat Creek RV Park which is located far away from cities and towns in the middle of a broad and very ancient volcanic caldera with walls reaching up several hundred feet.  Hat Creek is a quiet place with few people, but because it is located in a bowl, it is also quiet in the electromagnetic (EM) sense which is important to radio astronomers and people searching the galaxy for evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI).

For that reason, the Hat Creek caldera is home to the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) that was built for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute to support their ETI search program.  We men, of course, had to go visit the observatory since it was only about 1.5 miles from the RV park.  We drove over, went into the facility, talked to the staff, walked into the array of dishes, saw the data gathering and control equipment, and watched the obligatory video extolling the virtues of the radio observatory and its mission.  Then we took a lot of pictures, one of which you see here is a close up of one of dishes.

We were told that the ATA currently serves the radio astronomy needs of both the SETI Institute located in Menlo Park, and the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto.  The array signal feeds go directly to those locations for further analysis, and from there the surveillance directions for the array are transmitted.

After returning from our visit, my little feverish mind started recalling all the things I’ve been reading and thinking over the years about ETIs and the galaxy with multitudes of post-Singularity super-intelligences.  And the constant points that I always had to revisit was Drake’s formula for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, and Fermi’s ‘Where are they?’ or ‘Where is everybody?’

Physicist Enrico Fermi’s question is even more poignant today than it was over sixty years ago when he first posed it to John von Neumann.  Because to date we have spent a lot of money and brainpower pointing sensitive radio telescopes at the sky, and we have heard nothing but radio noise – no sign of intelligent transmissions.  So, is there really anybody out there, or are we really alone?  What can explain the silence?

Agnosticism vs Atheism

George Rebane

[The is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2015.]

Our secular humanist brethren misconstrue Darwin as having claimed and conclusively demonstrated that the cosmos was uncreated, and that life arose by chance from the primordial muck.  In fact, Darwin made neither claim, but did present compelling evidence that once life came about, it then began transforming to adapt to its environment through evolution.  Today evolutionary progress of the species has been accepted by all except the most fundamentalist believers in the several faiths.

Secular humanists of all stripes arose in the latter half of the 19th century, and by the mid-20th popular champions of ‘God is dead’ were penning eagerly read volumes claiming to demonstrate how science explained everything, including no need for creation and God.  All that was still required was the Big Bang.  Among those who arose to lead this movement of science-glorifying people to atheism, are Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins – the latter of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion fame.  Being a declared atheist was supposed signal to society that you were an intellectual, an independent thinker, and above all cool.

Walking Back Climate ‘Science’ & Policy (updated 22sep14)

Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.  Luke 23:34

George Rebane

On the front of the 20sep14 edition of WSJ is a top-of-the-page herald that reads ‘Climate Science is NOT Settled’ (emphasis theirs; source of filched photo).  I have waited at least ten years for the world’s preeminent newspaper to publish a major essay, so titled and no less by a scientist acknowledged by both true believers and skeptics.  The piece is written by Dr Steven E Koonin, now director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University, and formerly undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during Obama’s first term.  Other positions included professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech.  Let me be up front, this is an ‘I told you so all along’ posting in which I will engage in some well-deserved braggadocio here and again.

Koonin’s piece is somewhat awkward in its attempt to walk back the bamboozle from the 'science' and baseless public policies we have been subjected to for the last 20+ years.  However, it is rich in corroborating the exact laundry list of criticisms that we science-savvy climate skeptics have been alerting our readers to for at least a decade.  While the Sierra Economics and Science Foundation and RR have a long string of published critiques of what has passed for climate science from government grant-sucking academics and in the lamestream media, the heavy lifting in informing the public has been done by people like Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, and even our own Russ Steele.

Awkward or not, Dr Koonin has the courage to finally break the silence with which Teams Obama, Gore, Schwarzenegger, and now Moonbeam have greeted every substantive counter to the arguments claimed to have been made in the various reports released over the years by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Before going into some detail, let me give the overview that Koonin’s arguments follow exactly the (Venn) diagrammatic structure of the same arguments I gave in my 2008 paper ‘Climate Change – A Format for Reasoned Dialogue’ available here.

The tagline to Koonin’s piece is “Climate change is real and affected by human activity, writes a former top science official of the Obama administration.  But we are very far from having the knowledge needed to make good policy.” (emphasis mine)  Koonin opens up with –

The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.

Manmade Global Warming – The Smoking Gun

George Rebane

I recently looked at the most revealing graphic on global warming that I have seen.  The link to it was sent to me by a regular RR reader who was equally amazed by what he saw.  It was assembled by Nir Shaviv of sciencebits.com and is reproduced below.


The figure illustrates the uncertainty bounds for global temperatures predicted by climate theory over the years since 1979.  These were obtained from computer models which implement the relationships (equations) prescribed by the then best available climate theories assessed by the IPCC, and as most recently vouched for in their just released AR5 report.  Do you by chance notice anything odd in that figure?

Hockeystick Hansen Strikes Again (updated 7aug12)

"In fact, [climate change] has now driven our climate outside the range that has existed the last 10,000 years..." -- Dr. James Hansen (from NPR)

George Rebane

There’s a coordinated blitz to recover ground lost to climate change skeptics in the past couple of years.  The lost ground is uneven – in fact, in California there’s actually been a gain as the rogue CARB continues creating chaos – but there’s been enough doubt expressed by politicians across the country so that another application of bogus science is called for to shore up the politically correct belief systems that have recently shown some fraying at the edges.

And who but that intrepid NASA scientist Hockeystick Hansen himself has leaped into the very breach of the breech with a Washington Post op-ed piece, and a report purported to be published by the National Academy of Sciences (I couldn’t find it, and their search engine has no knowledge of a James Hansen.  Hmmm.).  But there’s enough in the political coverage (here and here) of ol’ Hockeystick’s re-emergence to piece together the elements of his current assault on the nation’s credibility.

RR readers have been exposed to his shenanigans in past years when he first introduced his notorious global temperature ‘hockeystick’ (here and here).  And, in addition to scores of scientists, tireless bloggers like Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, and our own Russ Steele have spent years laying bare the errors and lack of science that the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) crowd assembled by the UN has been inflicting on the world’s public policies.

Well, now Dr Hansen claims that all these extreme hot weather events we’ve had in the last few years are proof positive that they are caused by AGW.  BTW, the cold weather events during the same interval are just that, ‘weather’ and not climate change.  You gotta have a PhD to tell the difference.

And this time he’s not bringing up another collection of dodgy computer models like those that created the hockeystick.  No, now he’s appealing to established statistics and recorded historical weather data – you know, bell curves and all that.  Well actually it’s hard to tell what kind of statistics he’s using because the media are guaranteed to muck up what he really did.  All we know from the reports is that he compared data from the base period of 1951-1980 with data from 1981-2010 – two thirty-year periods from a (climate) process that changes in the order of centuries.  Best to watch the NPR video to get the gist of his arguments.

Assuming he carefully tallied up weather events of various intensities for the base period, he could then make a histogram that plots weather intensity (x-axis) against the number of such incidents for each level of weather intensity (y-axis).  He then fits a bell curve (Gaussian distribution) to this histogram.  Then he does the same thing for the 1981-2010 interval data, and lays the two bell curves over each other.  And by Jove, it appears that the most recent bell curve is visibly shifted to the right of the base period bell curve.

The extreme weather events are those represented by the right tails of the two bell curves (see Hansen’s figures in the video), and the most recent 30 years shows a higher number for any intensity level of weather events.  So there you have it, slam dunk, end of story, AGW is here, let’s get that cap n’tax legislation going again.

Judea Pearl, Turing Laureate

George Rebane

Judea Pearl, Professor of Computer Sciences UCLA, received the A.M. Turing Award last night at the awards banquet of the Association of Computing Machinery at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.  He now joins the forty-three previous laureates of the ‘Nobel prize of computing’, of whom twenty-five were in attendance to honor him.

Jo Ann and I joined the gala celebration as guests of the awardee, and sat with family and friends, most of whom we have known for decades.  (I am a lifelong member of the ACM.)  The awards banquet also honored other contributors to the field and culminated in the Turing Award presentation.  Here is ACM’s official, yet still modest, recounting of Judea’s accomplishments.

The Pearls became family friends soon after Judea Pearl collaborated on a project with a ‘black studies’ company I was running in the 1970s.  Judea’s wife Ruth (an accomplished software engineer in her own right) is a consummate hostess.  Jo Ann also had (still has) a reputation for putting on mean soirees that, with the passing hours, devolved into impromptu performances ranging from poetry recitations, through heated debates on various arcane and absorbing topics, to planned revivals of long ago salons of the Englightment.

We were often at each other’s house for such dinners, parties, and special noodling sessions.  These always included music that had us singing with guitars and keyboard for accompaniment.  Judea is an accomplished guitar player, keyboardist, and has a great singing voice.  He’s also a world class choral conductor and has performed numerous times at the LA Music Center.  (I was the less practiced one on both instruments, making up in volume for what I lacked in technique.)

A couple of shared memories from a rich catalog.  For Ruth’s birthday one year Judea invited us and another couple to a small westside bistro in LA.  We knew that something special was going to happen because Judea brought his guitar; but what could that be since we were eating in a restaurant?  Not a problem, soon the main course was finished, and after dinner drinks were in hand.  The lights were low and the atmosphere was perfect as Judea reached behind his chair for his trusty guitar and putting a foot on his chair, he launched into a medley of love songs to his bride of many years.

The other patrons in the restaurant were enthralled along with those at our table.  I recall Judea ending his special gift to Ruth (and the rest of us) with a rendition of a soulful Spanish adagio for solo trumpet and guitar from a piece I could not place.  It was a night to remember, as Judea kissed Ruth to the applause of the entire restaurant.  (Solo trumpet?  Did I fail to mention that Judea also has a unique gift, the ability to purse his lips, puff his cheeks, and perfectly simulate the sound of a virtuoso trumpet?)

Another memory is when I got a call late one afternoon from Judea saying that Ed Feigenbaum was in town and could drop by for some dinner and talk; would I care to join them?  (The techie reader will recognize Feigenbaum as a renown giant of AI, ‘father of expert systems’, and Turing laureate who taught for years at Stanford - now professor emeritus.)  Long story short.  After one of Ruth’s ‘oh it’s nothing’ fabulous meals, the three of us retired to the patio and spent the next four (five?) hours talking about the state of machine intelligence, who was doing what, and possible directions the science would take and its impact on society.  At the time Judea had already published his landmark 1986 paper and was working on his 1988 book on Bayes nets (I was one of Judea’s doctoral students doing research in Bayes learning).  It was clear that the torch would soon be passed from Feigenbaum’s expert systems to Pearl’s Bayes nets (with causality soon making its early murmurs).  Truly another memorable night.
   
So that was the basis for all the fuss this weekend at the Rebane household.   Yesterday morning we dropped off our puppy with the Steeles, and headed through a hot and crowded central valley to San Francisco.  Judea and I were able to spend some quality time together before the band started playing.  (The picture with the other white haired professor catches a debate on who has known Judea the longest - I foolishly thought c'est moi.  I came in a distant second to the good professor who has known Judea since they were playmates on an Israeli kibbutz eons ago while the Brits still ran Palestine.)

Jo Ann and Ruth picked up where they left off (top picture).  Ruth also sits on the board of the Daniel Pearl Foundation which is dedicated in memory of their son and has as its mission statement –

The Daniel Pearl Foundation has been formed by Danny's family and friends to continue Danny's mission and to address the root causes of this tragedy, in the spirit, style, and principles that shaped Danny's work and character. These principles include uncompromised objectivity and integrity; insightful and unconventional perspective; tolerance and respect for people of all cultures; unshaken belief in the effectiveness of education and communication; and the love of music, humor, and friendship.

(Full disclosure: Jo Ann and I are ongoing supporters of the foundation, especially its work in bringing greater mutual understanding between Islamic and western cultures.)

The Bayes Surface and more (updated 19jan13)

 George Rebane

[This post continues the numeracy series on the Bayes contribution to our civilization.  For more background and examples, please see ‘Making Medical Decisions’.]   


What you see here is a 3D graphical illustration of the celebrated Bayes Theorem (or formula).  I have not seen this beautiful surface presented in the literature, so I wrote a little program to do just that.  In this representation the Bayes formula (seen above the surface) is expressed in its likelihood form.  We are reminded that the Bayes Theorem is the correct and most powerful process by which we take existing uncertain knowledge, combine it with new data or observations, and update that knowledge.

Today the Bayes Theorem underlies the operational principles embedded in so much of what makes our modern world.  It is safe to say that most new technologies in fields that include medicine, energy exploration and production, finance, communication, space exploration, transportation (land, sea, air), defense, the internet, manufacturing, distribution of goods and power, … would be handicapped beyond belief were we to remove their Bayesian components – we would literally be thrown back into the technological age of the 1950s, and our modern world would cease to exist.

To the above list we add artificial or machine intelligence (AI for short), all forms of which are now based on Bayesian inference and its newest offspring, the new calculus of causality.  These applications focus on learning from the real world, a world which presents itself ambiguously within confounding frames of uncertainty.   As critters, our brainbones have evolved to make Bayesian kinds of decisions within a utility that ranks survival highest.  Many of our neural structures appear to have parts of the illustrated surface hardwired into what Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow, 2012) has identified as our intuitive ‘System 1’ cognitive processor that lets us come to rapid conclusions.

Courtroom Evidence – the Z/M case (updated 28apr12)

George Rebane

Reason and logic have always had a low survival rate in courtrooms, especially where poorly understood evidence of a technical nature is presented by self-serving lawyers to innumerate juries.  In recent memory, the OJ Simpson murder trial may serve as a nationally prominent Exhibit A for this proposition.

Today we have the much examined and touted (for various agendas) Zimmerman/Martin shooting case that will soon be going to trial.   Much effort and focus is put on a piece of recorded audio that appears to have become the evidence by which Zimmerman’s claim of justifiable homicide will stand or fall.  This audio clip is now undergoing forensic analysis by state agencies and private parties having court-acknowledged expertise in matters pertaining to analyzing speech.  Some of these experts have apparently weighed in with some “preliminary findings” which now serve as grist for the media mill and a large gaggle of very opinionated bloggers, commenters, and self-appointed jurists in the blogosphere.

RR has chosen not to join this cohort opining on Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence, instead we wish to use the case to examine the larger questions of ‘stand your ground’ victims’ rights, and in this  piece how to properly look at reported evidence in such cases.  In the following we take a look at a report on the blog of “legal scholar” Professor Jonathan Turley by guest poster Mark Esposito.

I have no idea of Mr Esposito’s qualifications, but simply post his opening paragraph that also happens to be his summa.

The  chair emeritus for the American Board of Recorded Evidence, Tom Owen, and Ed Primeau, a Michigan-based audio engineer and forensics expert, have independently concluded that the furtive pleas for help clearly heard on the 911 tapes are not George Zimmerman’s. Both acknowledged experts used voice enhancing software, but different techniques, to rate the probability of the voice being Zimmerman’s at no more than 48%.  A 90% match is considered scientifically reliable.

So there you have it, the case is seemingly closed.  But not quite.

Making Medical Decisions

George Rebane

[This introduction to modern medical decision making is intended as the first of a series of such essays on RR.  Subsequent pieces will cover simplifying nomograms (to avoid the arithmetic), personal utility (always subjective), and planning sequential diagnostics and treatments.  The aim here is to prepare the intelligent healthcare customer to communicate effectively with the healthcare industry and make prudent decisions for his own benefit.  A related background tutorial by the author for this piece is 'Hello Bayes Theorem!']

The healthcare industry woefully lags in many areas, but helping patients make correct decisions about their individual healthcare is where healthcare providers, led by attending physicians, are pathetically behind the times.  Let me explain.

Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award

George Rebane

The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that it has named Dr Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for 2011.  The announcement itself begins –

NEW YORK, March 15, 2012—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. His work serves as the standard method for handling uncertainty in computer systems, with applications ranging from medical diagnosis, homeland security and genetic counseling to natural language understanding and mapping gene expression data. His influence extends beyond artificial intelligence and even computer science, to human reasoning and the philosophy of science.

The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. It is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, whose 100th anniversary will be celebrated in June at the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration that includes 34 past Turing Award winners along with Pearl.

"Like Alan Turing himself, Pearl turned his thinking to constructing procedures that might be harnessed to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence," said Vint Cerf, chair of the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration, and a former ACM Turing Award recipient. "His accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning, and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine.'" Cerf pointed to Pearl’s innovation as a quantum leap from Turing’s "test" dating to the 1950s, when Turing set out to discover if machines could think. "Pearl's work on reasoning with uncertainty as well as his game˗changing contributions to machine reasoning about causality have had a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science, and statistics," Cerf said.

The rest of the announcement may be read here.

Judea Pearl and I first became acquainted as colleagues on various defense research projects during the 1970s when he consulted for the small ‘black studies’ company that I headed during that period.  Subsequently our families became friends and over the years we spent many evenings in exciting discussions and song (Judea on guitar and me on the keyboard - Judea is an excellent musician in voice, choral, and several instruments.).  It was Judea who convinced me to complete my doctorate and join his small troupe of students at UCLA working on the various research tasks that served as the halo around the magnificent tour de force that Judea Pearl presented to the world when he showed how Bayesian networks could be constructed and correctly computed.

Once his 1988 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference was published, Bayes nets became and have remained the state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.  Bayesian inference now is the standard in all applications that required correct probabilistic reasoning, decisions under uncertainty, and management of risk - in short in all human endeavors.  Every field that has not embraced what Pearl started with Bayes is now scrambling to catch up.

I have long had the honor of calling Judea Pearl my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.  Those of us who had the good fortune to recognize early his genius and accomplishments were amply rewarded by what he taught us, and how he guided our individual contributions (my own humble efforts were in machine learning and causality).  It is most appropriate that Judea now joins the pantheon of the recognized greats in computer science. 

From Lysenko Loonies to Climate Change Clowns

George Rebane

The 27jan12 WSJ publishes a major piece ‘No Need to Panic About Global Warming’ signed by sixteen science and technology heavyweights.  From my perspective as a systems scientist, I long ago joined the once lonely voices that pointed out that the climate change alarmists (especially of the anthropogenic global warming stripe) were intellectually naked shills with a pernicious political agenda.

Led by internationally recognized serious science commentators (links on right) like Anthony Watts, and locally by Russ Steele, the voices of reason and scientific accuracy have been growing and becoming more prominent over the last years.  But the political steamroller has yet to show significant slowing.  AGW is now a recognized and much applied tool of the political Left which uses it at every turn to remove individual liberties and shackle economies.

The authors of the cited piece point out the eerie similarities of how politicized science today recalls the days of church proscribed scientific enquiry and communist mandated politically correct sciences of (Lysenko, et.al.) of the USSR during the first half of the 20th century.  We are there again with claimed “incontrovertible evidence” that AGW exists.  Science contains no incontrovertible evidence, and once ‘evidence’ is so ascribed, it exits the halls of reasonable enquiry and science and enters the temples of religion.

The piece concludes –

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

The Value of Stereotyping

George Rebane

Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full of writing instruments more often seen in the shirt pockets of male engineers than in the pockets of other men.

Stereotyping has gotten a bad rap in our society, and its use is roundly criticized in the public forum.  However, stereotyping, so as to assign or exclude someone from membership in a given class, is built in to almost every critter that lives on this planet.  Why?  Simply because it is a low cost survival technique that has evolved in all species to simplify quick decisions about the famous ‘Three F’ functions – feed, fight, or mount - important to everyone.

But if you understand the underpinnings of stereotyping, it can be a valuable tool in making all kinds of decisions, and also serve as a mirror for better understanding yourself.  I was motivated to write this piece when recently reading Daniel Kahneman’s monumental Thinking, Fast and Slow which dances around the subject without getting into the nitty-gritty of it because of the little math involved.  Kahneman, recent Nobelist and co-father of behavioral economics with the late Amos Tversky, is also a giant in the field of psychology.  In that field stereotyping comes up under the forbidding label of representativeness (q.v. – which is short for quod vide or ‘which see’, and I’ve concluded that its modern version is simply ‘google it’.)

Now consider seeing a good looking woman, finely coiffed, beautifully dressed, and dripping with expensive jewelry, getting out of a chauffeured limousine in front of a fancy restaurant.  You wonder if she’s a member of the currently notorious ‘1%’.  More particularly, what are the chances (friendly word for ‘probability’) that she is a member of that exclusive class, given she has some of the stereotypical characteristics of that class that you just observed?  If you had been facing the other way and your friend told you that a woman just got out a car behind you; then without seeing her, what would you answer if he mused whether the woman belonged to the '1%'?

Science still says, ‘Creation occurred.’

George Rebane

The best brains in cosmology ranging from Stephen Hawking of Cambridge to Alan Guth of MIT have been trying to munge the equations and the data to come up with some/any kind of support for the proposition that the universe did not have a beginning.

NewScientist.com reports in ‘Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event’ -

YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday - loftily titled "State of the Universe" - two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.

One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see "Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension"). The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

After looking under every theoretical rock available today, and then some, the bottom line is that “all these theories still demand a beginning.”

As a proponent of Intelligent Design (not to be confused with Creationism), I continue to celebrate such corroborative reports as satisfying Occam’s razor to the max.

'The Next Grand Minimum' Launches

George Rebane

Russ Steele, Nevada County blogger extraordinaire, closed down his long running NC Media Watch blog.  He has moved his blogging enterprise to a new blog - 'The Next Grand Minimum' - that was launched today.  In this research and publishing effort he will focus on real climate change backed by science that is yet to be tainted by politics.  Specifically, he will present ongoing scientific evidence - imported and generated - that will validate or falsify the advent of the next grand minimum (NGM) in earth's ever changing climate.

Grand minima in precipitation and temperature have occurred cyclically throughout the millenia, and the next one appears due in the lifetime of those of us here now.  Russ will collect, develop, and present evidence that is relative to the advent of this civilization impacting event.

I and most RR readers wish Russ the best in his new and important endeavor.  RR has installed a permanent link to the blog in the 'Our Links' section in the right panel.  We expect many points to the published work on that site.

Break a leg Russ!

How Social Engineering (almost always) Fails

George Rebane

Big government’s (centrally controlled) social programs have a daunting history of failures that more often than not spill over to spread their hurt into other unintended areas.  An excellent example of this – 'The State Against Blacks' - is given by economist Walter Williams in the 22jan11 WSJ.  Today we have entered the epoch of large government programs that range from long-entrenched farm subsidies through various targeted welfare and ‘stimulus’ programs to nationalized healthcare.  In this piece I would like to give a scientist’s view of how to look at and think about such programs with the goal of understanding their large-scale operational characteristics.  And further, how eventual failure is built into the very structural make-up of every such program.

From the gitgo I have to declare that this will not be an easy read, and damn near impossible for the innumerate (see numeracy).  My apologies are tempered by the reality that EVERY significant social issue comes down to understanding ‘the numbers’ involved in its framing and implementation.  Here ‘the numbers’ actually refer to a broader toolset from the system sciences.  So let’s dive in.