Hey pesto!
杏吧原创s in Louisiana (and elsewhere) worried that a new law will open the door to teaching creationism (12 July, p 8) seem to have a simple solution: learn from the creationists. Proponents of intelligent design have gazumped science in the public policy field, using academic freedom as an argument to get their teaching into the curriculum. 杏吧原创s can return the favour by insisting that the Christian God has no monopoly over explaining creation.
The beliefs of the are just as valid and, in the name of academic freedom, deserve to be taught in science classes alongside creationism. We can leave it to students’ “critical thinking” to work out which answer seems most reasonable. Indeed, there is no reason to restrict lessons to the theories of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, noble though they are. In the name of academic freedom, a veritable cacophony of creation theories should (and indeed must) be put forward. Creationists might soon find that they prefer dealing with one enemy, science, to a host of religious enemies.
Half wrong
If the intelligent tutoring system at the University of California, San Diego, currently “gets it right less than half the time” (5 July, p 23) when analysing students’ expressions to gauge how hard lectures are, then how about taking its results and concluding the exact opposite? Easy becomes hard and hard becomes easy…
For the record
鈥� We said that of 80 volunteers testing a single therapy for allergy, “only 20… reported side effects” and that this was “one tenth the number reported by those [93 volunteers] receiving the combination therapy” (26 July, p 11). To clarify: there were 20 reports of side effects in patients receiving monotherapy, compared with more than 200 separate adverse events reported by the 93 patients on combination treatment.
鈥� A diagram on our Technology page claimed: “The US has more than twice as many wireless internet hotspots as any other country” (17 May, p 25). This was unfounded. The figures on which it was based were for hotspots registered with one commercial organisation, which isn’t going to get a free ad out of us.
Crazy money
Thank you for covering an important area of economics theory not often covered in scientific publications. Your headline says it all: “Forget textbook economics, the answer lies elsewhere” (19 July, p 5 and p 32).
It is a shame that you do not mention the “elsewhere”. To me, it must lie in other areas of science and engineering where all of these phenomena have been experienced before. Such statements as “increasing leverage causes… could be thought of as gain in an electronic or generalised feedback system. When overall leverage reaches a certain point, system collapse is almost assured. Well, of course; keep raising the gain and most systems will become unstable and either oscillate or head for one of the boundary conditions.
Extra regulation might or might not help. The two things that must be understood are timing (system delays) and gain (leverage in this case). It would be useful to have a some mixed teams of economists and system engineers on this problem.
From Steve Hibbert
I have worked for a hedge fund manager on its electronic trading systems, with a remit to try to keep the systems from crashing during avalanches of trades. The traded products were financial, agricultural and commodity futures. These are fast-paced markets, changing prices many times per second as bids and offers are submitted electronically, often by computer programs.
This experience of working with and witnessing trading strategy and behaviour gave me an idea as to why the violent swings in price were happening. All traders, be they black-box algorithmic systems, employees of hedge funds, or “locals” (people trading their own accounts directly), were operating under the same strategy, and were all using the same information to make decisions. Hence, they “flocked”.
All traders in the same market get an electronic market quote at the same time, telling them the prices at which they can buy and sell. All participants pretty much have a theoretically “perfect” and anonymous view of the current market. With each successful trade, or bid placed, or offer removed, the market changes and the traders are updated on their electronic screens with the new market. This can happen many times per second.
Someone holding a particular contract, say for oil, has to make a decision when the oil market dips down: sell out and cut their loss, or ride it and see if comes back up. Selling gives you a definite small loss, and riding is more risky, potentially exposing you to greater losses, but also potentially no loss.
So, if you are conservative, you sell. If other traders are similarly astute and face the same situation, they too will sell. You can’t all take the best offer, so the price drops. More traders who hold oil contracts now face the same decision, sell or ride, and some more will try to sell to avoid holding rapidly cheapening contracts. The situation feeds-back and the price dumps, until pretty much everyone who was holding oil has either tried to sell or grimly stuck it out.
Now people who had no oil position can see that oil is now quite attractively under-priced, and they will start to buy up the very cheap oil contracts. Other traders will see the price of oil rise, and try to buy in to make money on the way up, and the price will spike upwards. It might bounce well above the average price on the day as more and more traders dive in to try to make some money quickly. The cycle of under and over-pricing may continue for a few rounds before it stabilises.
The point is this: the instability comes about because everyone is trying to do the same thing based on the same information. The strategy is “Buy Low, Sell High”, and the information is the market price that everyone can see. You don’t need news, or social interaction. The market price is your link to the thoughts of every other trader in the market. So long as you have this situation, you will have instability spikes.
London, UK
From Nick Macy
Twenty-five years ago, when I attended a seminar on the then-new market in derivative stock options, the inherent flaw in its operations was immediately apparent to me, although others seemed not to appreciate it at the time. Since then, the derivative market has burgeoned into a myriad of forms, taking over a large proportion of total stock trading and producing precisely the effects that I had predicted.
Most derivatives are predicated by a contract of sale or purchase whose execution is deferred until the arrival of a particular circumstance defined within the contract. Accordingly, when that circumstance occurs, the closure of the contract may be automatically triggered.
As a result, thousands of traders all over the world draw up their contracts, then simply set their computers to cut in and close the contract at the required moment. Obviously, many of them will have chosen the same time to close, so at that very moment (computers being what they are), thousand of transactions will be automatically triggered virtually simultaneously. This will have an immediate knock-on effect, as every computer programmed to cut in at the next stage of market change does so 鈥� then so on and so on. So the whole world market lurches uncontrollably in a see-saw manner.
The important thing to recognise is that this has nothing to do with the science of economics as such, any more than (say) meteorology has much to do in the short term with oceanography. While oceanography maps the arrangement of the Earth’s water masses within a basic tendency towards equilibrium, meteorology describes the weather effects including hurricanes, floods, tempests and so forth that are part of the process.
Similarly, economics describes the activities of humankind towards an equilibrium of wealth, while the operation of markets exhibits the storms and tempests that might occur along the way. The science of market operations needs its own name: I shall call it “agoralogy”.
Harlow, Essex, UK
Strange inheritance
The common view that Darwin did not believe that acquired characteristics could be inherited (12 July, p 28) is mistaken. In The Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley, Henry Huxley records Darwin’s fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace writing: “Darwin always believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, such as use and disuse… I also accepted the theory at first… but had to change my mind.” It may yet turn out that Darwin was ahead of his time in accepting an idea which has been the subject of much lampooning by his disciples.
Creativity evolving
John Postgate, criticising Stuart Kaufmann’s use of the word “creativity” in relation to evolutionary processes, describes natural selection as “random” (12 July, p 23). It is anything but: without the non-random process of selection, adaptation would be unlikely to occur.
When a non-random, but naturally occurring and understood, process generates a marvellous diversity of complex structures and behaviours, what other word is more apt than “creativity”? I contend that it is John Postgate who is erroneously reading conscious intent into Stuart Kaufmann’s use of the word creativity (10 May, p 52), rather than Kaufmann assigning mysticism to evolution.
When whale fall falls
Amitabh Avasthi’s report of the troubles of the eastern North Pacific grey whale (10 May, p 41) reminded me of Graham Lawton’s article on whale falls (12 November 2005, p 50) and in particular, estimates of some 850,000 whale carcasses on the seabed at any one time, compared with 80,000 hydrothermal vent sites, both supporting a number of common chemosynthesis-dependent species.
The annual number of whale falls, before commercial whaling got under way, is likely to have been hundreds or even thousands of times greater than today. This implies that human activity has drastically altered the ecosystem of the deep sea, by removing the greater part of the supply of organic material.
Lawton suggested that carcasses now occur about 12 kilometres apart, in various stages of decomposition. Along whale migration routes and in areas where whales congregate, such as summer or winter feeding grounds, carcasses in various stages of decomposition are likely to have occurred in close proximity pre-whaling, perhaps only a few hundred metres apart.
If partial whale skeletons persist for hundreds of years, there should be clearly discernible traces of whale material 鈥� remnants of bone or lipid sequences, or other more refractory material 鈥� in almost any sediment core taken in such an area. This would completely change our view of the deep ocean floor ecosystem prior to commercial whaling, in particular the dispersal routes available to chemosynthetic-dependent organisms. Is anyone out there looking into this possibility?
About your scan…
I found your article “We need to talk about your scan…” (5 July, p 8) very interesting, having taken part in a project on ageing with researchers at Oxford University. As part of this they asked that we have an MRI scan of our head at the beginning and end of the project. Unfortunately, I found the first scan painful: with every pulse it felt as if the left side of my brain was being squeezed hard, just inside the skull, and at the end I found it very difficult to move and talk. I was left with what I can only describe as the worst headache I have ever had, which took two days to dissipate.
The research workers say that I am the only person who has complained of this amongst the thousands whose heads have been scanned in MRI machines. They did not show me the results of the scan, merely said that it appeared similar to any other scan while they were monitoring it.
I am now looking for other people who have experienced similar reactions. I want to know what the implications are for my future health.
Me and my genome
Personal experiences of people who decided to get their DNA tested (5 July, p 36) gave me a good insight into the pros and cons of this new tool, which is likely to steal work from fortune-tellers. Though I am aware that the technology is not precise, I was nearly convinced that I should eventually undergo such a test when it improves.
But the term “sometime” was blurred just a week later, when Emma Young revealed epigenetics’ role in biology (12 July, p 29). DNA testing to predict my future now seems less reliable as it seemed before. The rule “Think twice 鈥� and wait for a week 鈥� before you go for a DNA testing” holds good.
Fractional charge
At school we were told that Robert Millikan, while measuring of the charge on the electron, had discarded one oil droplet which had a charge of one third “because it was obviously wrong”. Really?
Perhaps the best way to find any such fractionally charged particles would be with a modified version of his oil drop experiment. How to get the particle into the detector might be trickier but it could give the opportunity to put particles together in a more controlled way than hurling large numbers at each other and hoping for the best.
The editor writes:
鈥� Martin Perl is trying this at the in Menlo Park, California (21 June 2003, p 44).
Noise or noisome?
Laura Spinney considers whether the brain generates noise to heighten perceptual sensitivity (21 June, p 42). The answer appears to be no, unless there is a reason why sensitivity cannot be achieved by evolution producing neurons with lower firing thresholds.
Noise might not be the only explanation for the observation by Gero Miesenb枚ck of a noise-generating neural circuit in fruit flies. The interneurons which appear to introduce noise into the olfactory system are linked to learning and memory. Perhaps they implement memory of which smells appear together.
Say inedible, rancid meat triggers one set of neurons and these are linked, by interneurons, to the sensors for edible meat 鈥� the fly would be hypersensitive to the latter smell when the former is abundant. Connecting smells that occur together in the fly’s environment could increase its chances of finding food. This is not noise, but an intricate record of observed correlations.
Could this explain why when I burn meat on the barbecue, flies are helping themselves to salad?
Crazy money
Mark Buchanan is right to question the “rational” account of economics offered by the majority of economists (19 July, p 32). However, like them he describes the market as a natural phenomenon not a social one 鈥� he reifies it.
He rightly notes that markets are the sum of individuals’ actions, but fails (as do most economists) to acknowledge that markets are manifestations of legal regulation, for instance, laws on contract and property. Hence markets do not “evolve” as he suggests, but are rather facilitated by governments, often prompted by commercial interests seeking new opportunities to make a profit. The current crises may have been caused by individuals and companies, but we should not forget the political choices that facilitated the markets whose crises are now causing us so many problems.
A model of economics that ignores such prior political choices about markets will sadly remain unable to fully appreciate the mess we have got ourselves in.
From Mardi Dungey,
You interpret the results of the study by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and colleagues that many large jumps in stock prices are not associated with news releases as evidence of the failure of the equilibrium model of markets. The critical issue is how one defines a jump.
My colleagues and I have found that 80 per cent of jumps in US Treasury bond prices are associated with macroeconomic news events. At least some of the 20 per cent which were not can be traced to the release of other information, such as political announcements: see “Empirical Evidence on Jumps in the Term Structure of the US Treasury Market” at .
Cambridge, UK
From Andrew Slater
You observe “it is odd then that most economists seem uninterested, and only a small minority have embraced the new approach” to markets (19 July, p 5). The reason is simple: there is a Nobel prize in economics which promulgates mathematical elegance over realism.
Put simply, the orthodox economics and finance taught today in universities and business schools cannot be considered a science in any sense (not even a dismal one); it is no more than a fiction written in equations rather than prose. Moreover, it is not even called a Nobel prize in economics: its proper title is “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, but few realise that and assume the prize is on par with the rest. Removing the prize, or changing its name and criteria for award, would be a first step to achieving a new, and realistic, orthodoxy for economics.
Sevenoaks, Kent, UK
From Julian Wells,
As Mark Buchanan reports, agent-based modelling, and its close relative econophysics 鈥� the application of the statistical mechanics paradigm to economic problems 鈥� are doing much to illuminate problems which neoclassical economics and its obsession with equilibrium cannot touch. It would be a pity, however, if your readers were left with the impression that the lessons to be learned are confined to the need for more intelligent regulation of financial markets.
Agent-based modelling is producing a growing body of evidence to suggest that both inequality and general economic instability are inherent properties of uncoordinated exchange economies 鈥� a point made by a number of contributions to at Kingston.
Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, UK
Meaning what?
Stephen Wilson complains that Lawrence Krauss fails to recognise religious believers’ “yearning for meaning” in the face of a universe providing no evidence of a deity (5 July, p 20). True, religious apologists do say that sort of thing, but unfortunately never tell us what they mean by meaning. If they are looking for some way to make our species seem important in the cosmological scheme of things, they are doomed to failure, since all the evidence points rather to our lack of importance.
But if it is something else that believers are seeking so eagerly, they should attempt to make itclear what it is. Then perhaps we atheists might be able to help them to find some philosophical consolation.
Advertising ethics
A. C. Grayling calls academic exploration of the interface between science and religion an attempt to “give religion some of the respectability of science” (12 July, p 48). It is not. It is an endeavour to transcend the limitations inherent in the scientific strategy of bracketing out questions of meaning and value. To compare religious belief to astrological credulity is an unworthy polemical move, wholly neglecting the serious reasons that religious people (including many scientists) give in support of their belief.
Any project in science and religion, whether funded by the Templeton Foundation or not, deserves consideration on its intellectual merits and it is mere atheistic fundamentalism to declare a priori that none exist.
I am heartily sick of picking up my New 杏吧原创 and being faced with yet another episode in the slanging match between science and religion. Had I wanted to read theological debate, I would have subscribed to a theological magazine, not one supposedly devoted to reporting science.
I subscribe to no religion but have no gripe with those who do. All the mud-slinging in the world directed at me because I follow science, by those who subscribe to religious beliefs, would not alter my “faith” in science. Please stop subjecting me to this tripe every week.
Freshwater, Isle of Wight, UK